The privacy fallout continues.
Two top journalists from Le Monde are publishing a dissection of the Segolene Royal, Francois Hollande couple. It argues that the couple has been in total meltdown since 2005 and that Segolene's unlikely run was very much fueled by their union's implosion.
The authors are stellar reporters so consider it true, but being French establishment journos, it also remains ambiguous. No word exactly on what sparked the couple's demise (an infidelity apparently) and where it all stands now.
The couple in question have decided to sue the writers, though who knows how serious that legal pursuit is.
The news helps explain a lot of the ambiguities surrounding the Socialist campaign. Twenty-something Thomas Hollande's close collaboration with his mother always had a whiff of taking sides in a painful divorce to it. Then there were pictures of the daughters accompanying mom on a snap vacation to Italy. Those snaps had a "getting through a family crisis" feel about them too.
But most importantly, it explains the deep allergy Segolene maintained to her party, led by Francois, from the very start of her campaign. Her run for the presidency was dysfunctional par excellence and now, this book would have it, we know why.
UPDATE:
Versac says it straight. Didn't the French voter have the right to know this before? Many a journalist relayed a pack of lies up to now.
In three weeks, the French go to the polls.
Has everything been said that needs to be said in this campaign? Are Sarkozy, Segolene, Bayrou or anyone else going to do something that will really surprise us and change the equation?
It's hard to imagine. And the headlines in the French press are beginning to look a bit tired... I'm even tired.
The three leaders have pretty much run all over the ideology map. Extreme and combative one moment, moderate and cosy the next. As soon as an opening is made, the other candidate is immediately there to meet it.
In other words (and I hope you're sitting down), it's very much an "American" campaign.
Because no matter what anyone says, there is no ideology guiding this one. It's a personality contest, a referendum on who is going to lead France into the great unknown. A Berlusconi-lite in Sarkozy or a modern Anne d'Autriche in Segolene Royal.
So which one will it be?
Pepsi, Coke (or maybe RC Cola)?
After the French election, Senator Barak Obama should give Segolene a little phone call.
There's nothing quite like getting slammed by a veteran journalist as a rookie plagued with beginner mistakes.
The article, ridden with 'to be sures' and other such equivocating, reads like an excuse to just justify that headline, and in my mind at least, doesn't succeed. Mike Allen, the journalist, is often pilloried for such a thing.
Similarly, all through February, Segolene Royal was accused of making gaffes, and her polling numbers were brought down to earth. In hindsight, none of the accusations have stuck particularly, and she plods on her with a consistent 26 percent (the same as Mitterand got in 1981).
Barry Hussein should watch closely and see what happens.
A recent column by Roger Cohen in the Herald Tribune (sub required) ends with a quote:
"The French are tired of conventional politics," said Philippe Labro, a political commentator. "This is now about a man or a woman, about choosing who are you going to sleep with every night at 8 p.m. when the evening news begins."
It's a little pithy, but it does help address the oft-posed question for now left unanswered: What is this election really about?
In 1995, it was about the social divide, say the opinion makers. In 2002, it was about crime. What about 2007?
More than anything, (and in a way agreeing with Labro and Cohen), this election seems to be about casting. Who out of these three electables (Sego, Sarko and Bayrou), should lead the country into the great unknown.
Cohen seems to believe that the winner will take the torch and continue to reperesent 'La France" in that gaulliste, chiraquien style that makes all the world wince. Maybe so.
If Sarko wins, yes, he will make a go of it. He'll try to redo the Chirac, grandeur thing in his own image. But he's so divisive here, that legions of detractors will do everything to undermine any follies of greatness. 'La France', as Cohen calls it, will end in the blaze of battle.
Sego, if she squeaks through, will (intentionally or not) completely scramble the whole grandeur thing. The role is so tailored for a tall man in a big suit (see photo), that her very being there will be, symbolically at least, revolutionary. Segolene, whether she cops to it or not, will be the end the fifth republic, the very moment she takes office.
Bayrou? Who knows. But something tells me that Simone Veil loathes Bayrou as she does because she suspects that he's a man who could easily get lost in the whole president thing. Christophe Barbier floated it out there recently on his blog. Is there a classic Chiraquien lurking somewhere in the Bayrou phenomenon? Can that grandeur, that providentially tinged arrogance, make its way into the Centrist insurgency?
(And if you want an idea of what that arrogance may read like from the other side, the grandiloquent Simone Gbagbo, first lady of Cote d'Ivoire, has put it in a new book, where, she writes, Chirac "tried too hard to play the role of pater familias".
The Tony Soprano of francophone Africa? Who of the candidates will turn that that role down?)
When I think about Francois Bayrou, I can't help thinking about Ross Perot as well. Let's be frank: if it wasn't for Ross Perot, Bill Clinton would have never been president.
If Wikipedia serves, in the 1992 election (my first as a voter!), batty billionaire Perot got about 19 percent of the popular vote and the largest chunk of that historically swung Republican. Clinton became president with about 43 percent of the vote (less than Bush's 49.9 in 2000).
As a master spoiler like Perot, what damage can Bayrou inflict? If he doesn't fizzle, where do his votes come from, and who, if he himself doesn't become president, will he help become president, like Perot enabled Clinton?
All the world is talking about Sego's votes being lost. But is this really true?
In Paris, where the taste-makers live, it's obvious that Blairist Socialists are defecting to Bayrou, but as the referedum vote of 2005 proved, this educated Parisian population (the ones who just love London and the IHT) hardly match in vote count what they do in self-perceived influence.
So beyond the taste-makers, then, where would Bayrou get his votes? In towns like St. Etienne, Marseille, Correze, Bayonne, etc., where does the centrist find his current 18-19 percent in the polls?
Moderate Chirac voters, no? The very electorate that Sarkozy was initially trying to woo when he announced his candidacy in June with the leftist images of Mitterand, Jaures and Blum.
But switching strategies (or adding a strategy?), Sarko has now veered to the right to poach in Le Pen grounds; cover your base, pass the first round, and then enlarge for the second seems to be the new order of the day.
So much with Sarko having softened, apparently. So much with the lefty make-over.
Meanwhile, sullied Segolene continues to float along with her 26 percent in the first round.
That number hasn't changed much since January. She protects it as if its her own little baby, nurturing it along, convinced that like a thankful child, it will drop her into the promised ground of the second round. And with the loony leftists yet to show the merest polling pulse, she's accomplished more than Jospin ever could.
And any person who dares to disturb her serenity -that quiet and soulful understanding with her 26 percent base- is evicted vociferously and firmly to the door ("who is Eric Besson?", "good riddance Claude Allegre!").
Her little 26 percent will take her all the way, she seems to be thinking. And who knows, with Bayrou confusing the compass much like Perot did, it very well could.