France's left-leaning voters want a female candidate for the Presidential elections in 2007: Ms. Segolene Royal is a former minister for family affairs and now president of one of the most important regions of France, Poitou-Charente. She is the first female regional president.
Ms. Royal gave a strong signal last week in an interview with the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur: 'If the momentum continues as I believe it will, if leftwing voters ask me to as I hope they will, naturally, I will stand.'
Polls show a majority of Socialist Party sympathisers are behind her, a much higher percentage then for her partner, Francois Hollande, the Socialist Party leader. But in these polls she also beats the former socialist prime-minister Lionel Jospin, who comes second.
It is a hard message for other socialist presidential candidates. Jacques Lang, a former minister for culture, told the photogenic Ms Royal, that 'elections are not a beauty contest'. Another male response came from Laurent Fabius, a former socialist prime minister with presidential ambitions; he asked her, if she became president 'who would look after her young children '.
Among potential candidates of all parties, Ms. Royal comes second with 13 percent, far behind Nicolas Sarkozy, the rightwing interior minister, who leads with 26 percent. In the polls he is also far ahead of his partisan Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister. Sarkozy won over voters with an uncompromising stance on crime and during the November riots in France's larger cities.
