On this day in 2007: France’s powerful couple keep the front line in a race riven by intrigue
Any presidential campaign has its share of symbolic moments that change the course of the race, whether it be instant tides or accidents filled with meaning only in hindsight.
As French voters prepare to elect a president in April, Jowhargets a look at some symbolic moments from past election campaigns. In the Spotlight: Socialist Party candidate Segolene Royal’s 2007 campaign career is filled with drama off the stage.
Just 24 days before the first round of the 2007 French presidential election, socialist candidate Segolene Royal took to the stage for a much-anticipated presidential election campaign in Limoges. The event was so unusual that it was, finally, the first and only gathering for the 2007 Royal Storm campaign to see the Socialist candidate appear on stage with her party leader, François Hollande.
Officially, the couple have long been the power couple, whose careers overlap at the top of French politics for decades. But behind the scenes, the wheels are off. Hollande went on to win the Elysee Palace himself five years later. But Royal’s 2007 bid was doomed from the start, as the socialist couple’s secret pricked her side. In hindsight, those awkward forty-eight seconds from the common lights of Limoges–all steady smiles and stammering hesitations–spoke in great volume.
The good times, after all, were on display with pride. The gentle Hollande and the Wallflower Royal met in 1978 as fellows at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, France’s largest training ground for the political elite. When socialist François Mitterrand won the French presidency in 1981, the Elysee Palace appointed two promising young leftists as presidential advisers – Hollande on economics, and Royal on social and environmental issues. Both went on to win the House of Representatives elections in 1988. Royal was appointed Cabinet Minister three times. Holland spent 11 years as party leader as of 1997. The couple never married, but they have four children together. The youngest of them, Flora, made her television debut as a newborn in 1992 when Royal, then the environment minister, invited a news crew into the maternity ward. By the time Royal tapped into those clever media instincts in a presidential race 15 years later, the French public could have been forgiven for thinking they were privy to family affairs.
From the perspective of the current presidential contest — a 2022 campaign overshadowed by war in Europe, an incumbent running against repeat candidates and a Socialist contender with a 2% slump in the polls — it’s hard to overstate the relative intensity, even charm, of the 2007 race. When the campaign began, it was set to signal a change of guard: Conservative Jacques Chirac, who had been pushed at 75, was stepping down after 12 years as president. A new generation, one of two of the first Baby Boomer contestants, was poised to take office: hardliner Nicolas Sarkozy, 52, of the political or royal right, 53, the first woman ever to run with a serious chance of becoming France’s president, left.
Sarkozy, Chirac’s interior minister, has been vocal about his presidential ambitions for years. But Royal surprised even the VIPs of her party when she threw her hat in the ring. When Royal was told he was defending an independent bid for the 2007 Socialist Party nomination, former Socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius was quoted as planning to run, pondering, “But who’s going to take care of the kids?” (Fabius later denied the phrase, but the quote is stuck in the French political tradition as shorthand for the party’s rejection of Royal and the persistent sexism of the era.)
But Royal, like any other socialist, struck a chord. In late 2006, she defeated two Socialist heavyweights, Fabius and former Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn, to win the party’s primaries by an landslide.
From there, I rode a wave of public enthusiasm—dubbed “segomania”—to the sheer bewilderment of the party elite. At odds with the mental confidence of the Socialist Party, she saw it as a frustrated club of old boys, and in disagreements with party chief Holland, Royal led an innovative grassroots campaign, largely separate from the party structure, to remarkable effect. It attracted legions of new party members and gained new support from the working class and immigrant-rich French suburbs to attend rallies and vote. When Royal spoke on stage, supporters would sometimes throw fresh red roses – the symbol of the Socialist Party – which she looked up from the podium to gather at her high-heeled feet. The Rockstars signed off on the case, welcoming 40,000 royal fans for three hours at an outdoor stadium on Labor Day in Paris.
Meanwhile, Holland achieved the path of his party’s candidate. But he did it pretty much on his own, far from the main attraction. The former couple separated from power secretly. Their lack of communication led to contradictory interviews about the candidate’s programme. “The worse it is for her, the more Segolene Royal tends to keep up with appearances, deliberately keeping the lie,” L’Express reported years later. “At night, the car left the campaign headquarters for Royal’s house…More often than not the car was empty: the candidate had made herself a hidden room, unbeknownst to her team, in her campaign headquarters, where her sleepless nights continued.”
In the end, Royal’s campaign proved no match for Sarkozy, the prominent activist at the head of a disciplined conservative party machine. In May 2007, Sarkozy defeated Royal in the run-off by 53 to 47 percent. Once France’s 2007 election season finally came to a close, with legislative elections in June, Royal revealed that she had asked Hollande to leave, freely to pursue a “romantic affair” from its end. Hollande’s rumored attempt with Paris Match journalist Valerie Trierweiler, 11 years younger than Royal, turned out to be correct.
By all accounts, the secret split and the accompanying split of loyalties had an embarrassing effect on Royal’s bid. “Never has French history, as it is fiction, known such a scenario,” opens Le Monde newspaper after all was revealed last June. “Political life has clearly not been subjected to such special torments, which have led to journalistic certainty and partisan humility [and]The party supporters’ fascination with equilibrium.
Conclusion
Sarkozy won the 2007 elections easily by French standards. But the night of the governor’s election, and indeed his first months in office, was notorious for romantic intrigue as well, with his marriage to his second wife Cecilia secretly on the rocks. Five months later, Sarkozy became the first French president to divorce while in office. Four months later, he became only the second ever to marry while on the job, and tied the knot with pop star Carla Bruni in February 2008.
Hollande, for his part, ended Sarkozy’s hopes of re-election in 2012, winning the presidency with Trierweiler on his arm. He had defeated five Socialists, including Royal, in the 2011 party primaries, after which Royal endorsed her former running mate. “You have to admit this couple’s record isn’t that bad, with four kids and two presidential candidates,” Royal said at the time as she buried the hatchet. Still popular with socialist supporters, Royal was even a hit for Holland in 2012, joining him on stage for an April rally. On the podium in Rennes, Hollande told a crowd of 18,000: “Segolene Royal is here too, as a symbol of unity, the unity that was missing in 2007, and that is here now strong.”
France’s opposition Socialist Party (PS) candidate for the 2012 French presidential election, François Hollande waves as he arrives on stage near Poitou-Charentes region president Segolene Royal during an election meeting on April 4, 2012 in Rennes, France. © Damien Meyer, AFP / File It is known that the loneliness in Hollande’s private presidential life will not last at the Elysee either. In 2014, an illustrated tabloid published photographs allegedly showing the helmeted socialist president visiting a late-night lover on the back of a bodyguard’s motorbike, and the bodyguard allegedly returning with a croissant the next morning. It was the beginning of the end for Holland and the Troller, as rumors of his affair with movie star Julie Gayet were finally proven true.
With the 2022 campaign looming, Royal praised rival conservative Les Républicains after Valérie Pécresse won the primaries, becoming the party’s first woman to run for president.
“Obviously the male politicians around Valerie Pecresse were very fit,” Le Parisien said in December. “Something I’ve never had: the heavyweight socialists of the time had their noses up, except for a few,” she said. Referring to the misogynistic statements grudgingly attributed to Socialists at the time, Royal said, “My party men were not prepared. They were far more shaken than the Republican men of today to see a woman in front of them.”
She praised the “flawless” performance of the conservative candidate before clearly adding, “Pécresse, for her part, has a husband who supports her. That’s a huge credit.”
French presidential elections © France 24
