By announcing on Friday her intention to lead a left-wing “union” list with La France Insoumise in the European elections, Ségolène Royal is pursuing a strategy of permanent brilliance proven during forty years of political life but whose successes now appear more more blurry.
That 2007 seems far away… Appointed that year as a candidate for the presidential election by socialist activists, Ségolène Royal then experienced the peak of a career – she was the first woman to qualify in the second round in the race for the Elysée – at the same time as the beginning of its decline – its countless attempts to come back have so far remained in vain.
“Stop? It’s unthinkable. It’s my passion,” she warned in 2012 after losing her seat as an MP.
Twenty years earlier, the young minister, almost unknown, had invited the cameras of the 20-hour newspaper of TF1 and Antenne 2 (now France 2) in her maternity room, with in her arms the child she had just given birth to. give birth. “Segolenism”, or the art of stepping aside to attract light, was born.
The skids have since seized the machine.
Admittedly, Ségolène Royal surprised for a long time by her resilience: all smiles on the roofs of the headquarters of Solférino in front of a jubilant crowd on the evening of her defeat in the presidential election, she had revived a few weeks later during an astonishing meeting where she made the public repeat “Fra-ter-ni-té” in a loop.
Accustomed to taunts, the one who launched “Love each other” never escaped the caricature of a “Madonna” with “messianic” accents, a way of sending her back to an austere childhood with a military father. sensitive to far-right theses and an assigned stay-at-home mother as devoted to her family as to the Catholic faith.
Iconoclast, cantor of “just order”, supporter of the intervention of the army in the suburbs and slayer of Japanese cartoons, Ségolène Royal has always played on these attacks, thinking that she has permanently shaken up politics since her performance in 2007. , also convinced of her “link” forged with the French.
Alas: for her first attempt to return during the socialist primary for the 2012 presidential election, she only won 6.95% of the votes of supporters, far behind the father of her children from whom she was separated, François Hollande. Facing the camera, she does not hold back her tears.
After returning to government in 2014, she voted for Emmanuel Macron in 2017, who named her ambassador. His criticisms of the executive, in defiance of the duty of reserve, earned him the dismissal.
From ? An abortive attempt to take the lead of a leftist list in Europe in 2019, already. The one who returned her PS card has never put her presidential ambitions aside, a plan calmed down in 2022 by polls which credit her with 5%. She finally prefers to support Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Above all, the former adviser to François Mitterrand at the Elysee Palace has been illustrated for several years by thundering outings.
One hundred and fifty young people, on their knees, hands tied or behind their heads, sometimes against a wall, arrested by the police in the Yvelines? “It didn’t hurt them, it will make them a memory.”
The hydroxychloroquine ban? “A kind of revenge against Professor Raoult.”
Cuba? “Really remarkable cleanliness and security, which are not achieved in many countries which today give lessons in human rights”.
Hired in 2021 as a columnist on BFMTV, she was fired a few days later after expressing doubts about the reality of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, in particular the Boutcha massacre.
Among many socialists, his evocation has for some time aroused exasperation, even (false) commiseration. She, top of the European list? “If Mélenchon accepts, they will lose everyone, even their own”, predicts a PS executive, according to whom “the old rebellious militants left the PS because of Ségolène”.
“She is convinced that she is popular and that she has a destiny and at each election, she imagines that she is the recourse”, chokes another, recalling that during her last candidacy, for the senatorial in 2021, she won only 11 votes among the 530 electors…
At the end of September, Ségolène Royal will celebrate her seventieth birthday, at the same time as she must become a columnist in a program by Cyril Hanouna on C8 to “decipher politics”.
Six months ago, his latest book called for “rejecting the cruelty of the world”. Its subtitle? “The time to love has come”.
26/08/2023 17:34:09 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP