WHEN President François Hollande reshuffled the cabinet following disastrous results for his Socialist Party in the March municipal elections, some people raised their eyebrows at the inclusion of Ségolène Royal who was given the post of the minister for ecology.
Typically enough, Royal lost no time in picking up a quarrel with Culture Minister Aurélie Philipetti only a week after her appointment. Philipetti’s conclusion: ‘Ségolène is a liability for the President.’ Royal on her part qualified Economy Minister Arnaud Montebourg, Finance Minister Michel Sapin and Prime Minister Emmanuel Valls as ‘a pack of machos.’
No doubt Ségolène Royal means well, but her earnest declarations have for some reason a tendency toward creating the inverse effects. Political analysts say this is so because in her zeal to do the right thing she often throws logic out of window.
When she was named Socialist Party candidate in the 2007 presidential election, Royal on a spur of the moment decided to go to Buenos Aires to pay a visit to Cristina de Kirchner, the Argentinian presidential candidate. Though the gimmick produced desired media publicity, it didn’t help her campaign. While Cristina won brilliantly, Ségolène lost to Nicolas Sarkozy.
Argentina was not the sole foreign trip she made that year. She went to many other countries and each time her blundering comments inevitably brought to focus her incapacity to grasp foreign affairs. On return from Afghanistan she urged the United Nations to take action against the Taliban regime, not realising that the Taliban were no longer in power. She made similar gaffes while visiting China, Quebec and the Middle East, thus losing a lot of credibility at home.
On return from Afghanistan Ségolène Royal urged the United Nations to take action against the Taliban regime, not realising that the Taliban were no longer in power.
The will to act autonomously and do whatever she thinks is good was evident in Ségolène Royal’s life early on. In 1972, at age 19, she sued her own father, a retired French army officer, on a family dispute and won the case after four years of a harsh legal battle. Her father died shortly after the verdict.
The youthful Ségolène entered political arena in the early 1980s with encouragement from the then president François Mitterrand and has remained in the limelight ever since, for better or for worse that is!
Though her obstinate fixation with independence and her career (as minister under different Socialist governments and as member of the National Assembly) remain admirable, the French public associates, ipso facto, Royal’s image with her being the former mistress of President François Hollande.
This somewhat negative portrait and the repeated failures have apparently had no effect on the pursuit of her dream of sitting over the realm of power one day. In 2008 she furiously contested the battle to become the head of the Socialist Party but lost. She tried once more to be the presidential candidate in the 2012 elections, but her own party members accorded her less than seven per cent votes in the preliminary ballot. Her attempt to become the National Assembly member a second time was of no avail either.
Though both deny it and claim to be the best of friends, relations between Ségolène Royal and François Hollande have remained tense since after their separation following 30 years of life together during which she bore him four children. Hollande, far from being the image of a Don Juan (to put it politely) has since lived with the Paris Match journalist Valérie Trierweiler for a while and is currently having an affair with an actress named Julie Gayet, some 20 years his junior.
True to the reputation of a beautiful diva that she undoubtedly is, Ségolène has blamed François Hollande at every occasion for the debacle that awaited her. Probably to quell prevailing rumours, or maybe only in the interest of his own peace of mind, the president decided to give her one more chance by including her in his new cabinet.
But, as we have already discussed earlier, Ségolène has taken measures to bring her own Royal touch to the tough challenge. Apart from proposing a new ecology tax, she has issued orders to all the female employees in her ministry not to wear low-neck décolté dresses while at work. “This encourages your male colleagues to view you as sex objects,” she tells them.
Intrigued, or probably even amused by these developments, the daily Le Figaro last week engaged a private opinion polls enterprise to find out what do the French really think of her. To the question, “Do you approve or do you disapprove of Ségolène Royal?” Sixty per cent of those interrogated replied in the negative.
The diva’s reaction was characteristic: “I am quite satisfied with this result. It means 40 per cent of the people are happy with what I am doing.”
—The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, May 25th, 2014
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