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French Socialist race tightens

Vaiju Naravane

Cardholders to elect presidential candidate today

Paris: Some 2,00,000 Socialist Party cardholders are to vote on Thursday to pick their candidate for France's presidential election scheduled for April and May 2007.

The three contenders, former Environment Minister Segolene Royal, former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius and former Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn, have been slugging it out in televised debates across the country.

Even if these encounters were considered tame (described by critics as elocution contests considering the candidates never directly engaged each other but replied in turn to questions put by journalists), they nevertheless highlighted the differences of opinion among the three. Ms. Royal, the attractive mother of four who heads the Poitou-Charentes region remains the frontrunner though her popularity has somewhat dimmed in the past weeks. She now appears less likely to win over 50 per cent of the vote in the first round to secure an outright victory. Her closest rival Mr. Strauss-Kahn who describes himself as a social democrat has eaten into Ms. Royal's formidable early lead.

Last week, one of his associates was accused of having circulated a video clip on the Internet that showed Ms. Royal suggesting that teachers from State schools need to spend more than the 18 hours weekly that they put in within the walls of their establishments.

Preparation work

Her remarks were truncated and taken out of context. Ms. Royal was in fact saying teachers should be given more facilities so that correction and preparation work could be done on the premises while helping out children who were lagging.

She did criticise State schoolteachers who gave private coaching lessons in fee-paying academies saying the practice privileged the children of the rich.

The remarks raised the hackles of several hundred thousand teachers who form an important Socialist constituency. Ms. Royal described the incident as "nasty and end of campaign dirty tricks" but her comments could cost her several hundred crucial votes.

The candidature of Mr. Laurant Fabius, who led the campaign against the proposed E.U. Constitution (the French rejected it in May 2005), has never really got off the ground.

Ms. Royal is credited with an approval rating of 52 per cent among Socialist sympathisers while Mr. Strauss-Kahn and Mr. Fabius are rated at 32 and 16 per cent respectively.

If Ms. Royal fails to win an outright first round victory, it is likely that her two opponents could join hands to engineer her defeat in the second round scheduled in two weeks' time.

Many persons are of the opinion that Ms. Royal, with her tough talk on security issues and her calls for greater austerity and honesty in public life, would be the Left wing candidate most capable of beating Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy who will in all probability be the candidate of the ruling conservative UMP party.

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