Godfather François ?

So - Mitterand the founder of the present-day PS, the unifier of the movement, the election-winner, the internationally-recognized reference. Royal knows the mileage she's getting, and her claim is well-timed and above all placed, Mitterand's parliamentary electoral base before he was elected president having been, precisely, Burgundy. (Mitterand's quasi-nickname for many years was "le député de la Nièvre", the deputy for the Nièvre, neighbouring département to the one Royal was speaking in). And the local bigwigs got into line to support her: Montebourg, of course, then the regional president, François Patriat (a friend of Mitterand's), and François Rebsamen, mayor of Dijon and N° 2 of the PS after Royal's significant other, François Hollande. (Lot of François's here, but is that surprising in France?)

This call on Mitterand's ghost is important because it underlines Royal's pretention to unite the party and make it a winner again. And it digs a hole under Lionel Jospin, who threw off the Mitterandian mantle, and lost. Meanwhile the two other serious contenders for the investiture, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Jack Lang, were called on today, by none other than François Rebsamen, PS N° 2, to desist in favour of Royal. The call was made with maximum publicity, by an interview in this morning's Le Parisien, followed by a stint on lunchtime TV news.

55-42 !!!

While Royal places herself more and more obviously as a sine qua non for the PS candidature, she is becoming so more and more for public opinion. The Burgundy weekend was preceded by an IFOP poll for the newspaper Ouest-France, which may turn out to be an outlier (in any case is too far from next year's election to offer a serious forecast), but which shows her extremely capable (and the only left candidate capable) of beating Sarkozy in Round Two:

Ségolène Royal	   55%	   Nicolas Sarkozy  42%
Jack Lang	   47%	      "       "     50%
Lionel Jospin	   44%	      "       "     53%
D. Strauss-Kahn    42%	      "       "     55%
François Hollande  41%	      "       "     56%
Laurent Fabius	   38%	      "       "     58%

While her highest supporters are: 57% men (hmm, wonder why?), and 70% the 18-25 demographic.

The fact is that she's keeping to generalities for now, and we don't know anything concrete about the kind of policies she would implement. Anyway, she would say it was up to the PS to build a platform, and the government to implement it. And her image and reputation are still fairly solid with a good proportion of the left, or she wouldn't be garnering numbers like these.

Update [2006-8-22 2:9:50 by afew]:An online poll run by Le Monde currently shows this:

Would you say the ideas defended by Ségolène Royal are rather on the left or on the right?

Left 39%
Right 17.1%
Neither left nor right 31.1%
Don't know 12.8%

Le Monde is generally considered a centre-left paper. There's a degree of uncertainty here, but less than one in five say her ideas are "on the right".

Rocky Sarko Horror Show

Sarkozy has been pushed out of the limelight this summer by the Lebanon war and Chirac's grandstanding. Chirac and Villepin have gained poll points, Sarkozy has lost. His reaction has been to use his position as Interior Minister to launch muscle ops like the one against the big squat in Cachan, and to use the holiday period to move ahead on the future clear-out of immigrant families without papers. But it seems for the moment (as I thought it might), that he is stuck with his hardline base and can't move back out to the centre. Yet another winning move by Royal.