Royal the favourite to reign over left in French politics (February 2)

Ségolène Royal, the rising star of the French Socialist party, is a keen admirer of Tony Blair and could draw on some of the UK prime minister's policies if elected France's first woman president in next year's elections.

Her comments may surprise some people. While Mr Blair is widely admired by Europe's social democrats for reinvigorating the Labour party, that view is not widely held in France where many socialists who would otherwise be aligned with the Blair project see him as a crypto-Thatcherite.

"I think Tony Blair has been caricatured in France. It does not bother me to claim adherence to some of his ideas," Ms Royal told the FT. "He has reinvested in public services. On youth unemployment, he has had real success by using more flexibility but also more security."

"Young graduates are better treated in the UK than in France, so it is not just for tax reasons that so many of our young are leaving France to go and work in the City of London," said Ms Royal, distancing herself from her party's deeply ingrained suspicion of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and Blairism. "We must not be blocked on any issues - like the 35-hour week, for instance," she said.

However, Ms Royal may disappoint any overseas investors hoping she could become the acceptable face of French socialism, as her ideas seem to be equally inspired by late president François Mitterrand, her former political master.

"How can the government cut public sector recruitment while the interior minister is calling for more police in schools, on trains and in the suburbs?"

She is also a critic of the government's labour market reforms, giving small businesses and employers of young people more flexibility by allowing them to fire staff easily in the first two years of a contract. "It is bad. It hits youth and gives them the wrong message by devaluing work," she said.

I saw the poll yesterday, and while I don't remember the exact question, it was something like "who would you vote for in this line up", with the most likely 10 candidates - i.e. one per party:

• Laguiller (Lutte Ouvrière - loony left)
  
• Besancenot (Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire - trots)
  
• Buffet (Parti Communiste)
  
• Voynet (Greens) - she has not been chosen yet by her party
  
• Royal
  
• Bayou (center right)
  
• Villepin
  
• Sarkozy
  
• de Villiers (sovereignist right)
  
• Le Pen

The barometre will regularly poll voting intentions. A list of candidates was given (see Jérôme's post) with a choice of five possible PS candidates in the first round of the election:

• Royal (34%)
  
• Jospin (23%)
  
• Lang (22%)
  
• Strauss-Kahn (18%)
  
• Fabius (15%)

Those five seem reasonably the most likely contenders within the PS. Obviously, however, the polling institute's choice of candidates, overall and PS, influences the results.

The second-round voting intentions were Royal 51%, Sarkozy 49% of votes cast (No vote cast = 14%.)

More interesting in my eyes is the table of voting transfer from Round One to Round Two. From which it appears, to summarize, that Royal would get significantly better support from the far left than Sarkozy from the far right -- only 66% of first-round Le Pen voters would vote Sarko in Round Two, which would seem to indicate the failure (for the moment) of Sarko's vote-fishing on the xenophobic right.

But this is only a poll, and only one poll, and far from the election...

Power production was halted in December 1996 for maintenance. However, following a court case led by opponents of the reactor, on February 28 1997 the Conseil d'État (Supreme State Administrative Court) ruled that a 1994 decree, authorizing that Superphénix could be restarted, was invalid. In June 1997, one of the first actions of Lionel Jospin on becoming Prime Minister was to announce the closure of the plant "because of its excessive costs". Jospin's government included Green ministers; critics have argued that Jospin's decision was motivated by political motives (i.e. please his unwieldy Green political allies) rather than rational considerations. (wiki)