Free Republic

Ségolène Royal, the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party, on Sunday unveiled a long-awaited, 100-proposal platform, veering sharply to the left on economic policy while also stressing discipline and traditional values. Ten weeks before elections, Royal is hoping to reverse a slide in popularity that has seen her lose ground to her main challenger, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. In a two-hour speech to about 10,000 supporters north of Paris, she pledged to raise pensions, increase the minimum wage to €1,500, or about $2,000, a month and guaranteed a job or further training to every youth within six months of graduating....

French presidential candidate Segolene Royal's political honeymoon is slowly coming to an end. The campaign of the Socialist Party candidate - who for months had captivated the French with her elegance and self-possession - has been beset by a series of gaffes and internal quarrels, just as the campaign of her conservative rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, is gathering pace. The latest incident involved Royal's notoriously outspoken spokesman, Arnaud Montebourg, who was suspended from the campaign for one month after an unfortunate verbal lapse. Appearing on a popular talk show on the cable channel Canal Plus, Montebourg said, "Segolene Royal...

France's interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, formally clinched the ruling conservatives' presidential nomination Sunday, pushing a pivotal race for a discouraged nation into high gear. The ruling UMP party announced that Sarkozy, the sole person listed on the party ballot, had won a vote by registered members. He now faces a tight race against the top contender on the left, Socialist Segolene Royal, for the elections in April and May. "I do not have the right to fail," Sarkozy told tens of thousands of supporters packed in a conference hall on Paris' southern edge. The anointment at a big-budget, American-style bash...

According to the latest polls, by spring 2007 the president of France could well be Nicolas Sarkozy, the man who The Washington Post described as “not your everyday French politician.”[1] For a start, the current French Interior Minister and leader of the UMP conservative party is pro-American. He understands that the war on terrorism is the world’s fight and not one America should have to bear alone. He grasps the nature of the threat facing Continental Europe from Muslim extremism and favors fighting terrorism head-on and without apology. His worldview is not one that ends in the Michelin-starred restaurants of...

The big political event in Europe over the weekend was a speech given in Marseilles by Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s interior minister and the right’s standard-bearer for the French presidency in next year’s elections. Arnaud Leparmentier of Le Monde thinks that Sarkozy’s speech marked a sharp move to the right, in the response to the emergence of a moderate, Ségolène Royal, as the likely Socialist candidate. Leparmentier cites, in particular, Sarkozy’s attack on the generation of May 1968. Foreign observers were very struck by the American-style razmatazz of the Sarkozy rally, complete with attendant pop stars. As Martin Arnold reports in...