March 25, 2007	Sunday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 5, 1428

LONDON: If only La Marseillaise contained some passing reference to the Almighty, you might get all French socialists singing from the same sheet music, and God Save the Queen might be their song.

Come last November when the Parti Socialiste made its logical choice of candidate (given, especially, what else it had to consider) for the French presidential elections, Ségolène Royal was, for a short time, not only the darling of la gauche, she was as near as could be in a republic to its queen. And as any consumer of French magazines and newspapers knows, the surname helped the allusion along very nicely indeed.

But in the past few weeks, she has seemed something of a royal pretender, accused of incompetence and running a guileless campaign and also lagging consistently behind Nicolas Sarkozy in the polls. This has left the “neither Sarko, nor Ségo” centrist François Bayrou snapping at her heels and assorted far lefties, who all managed to scramble the 500 mayors’ signatures enabling them to stand for election, threatening to capture a slice of her vote.

So far Ségo has tried sounding as right wing as Sarko on schools and youth crime, and as left wing as it takes to promise a Sixth Republic, waffle on about pensions and say that taking France forward will not be accomplished by adding a drop of social policy to an ocean of economic liberalism. French conservatives have plenty of options of their own without turning to a socialist, while none of Ségo’s lurches to the left seems to have satisfied the grumbling party elephants who never wanted her in the first place.

So now she wraps herself not so much in the French tricolour as in the stirring but bloodthirsty lines of one of the world’s most striking national anthems.

In her attempt to counter Sarko’s attempts to neutralise the menace of Le Pen’s outrageous nationalism and claim the far right vote as his own, Ségo has started insisting that her rallies should close with the impassioned sounds of La Marseillaise. When you see it on French TV, the footage shows Ségo looking proud and her supporters joining in as if they meant every word.

Perhaps my unease at her adoption of the anthem has something to do with the embarrassment God Save the Queen brings to plenty of Brits. You certainly cannot imagine any self-respecting Labour politician, even one of those Blairites who first chose politics and then a party, making any use whatever of our national anthem if only because they’d be wary of frightening off an inconveniently resilient army of supporters.

But maybe in France it will go down well for Ségo, especially if we can believe those early signs that Bayrou’s refreshing but ultimately meaningless challenge is fading.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service