La Femme
In fact, Royal seems innocent of any taint of economic liberalism. She regards Villepin’s peremptory imposition of the new law as a sign of a systematic failure to listen to ordinary people; but she does not view the national suspicion of market forces as a comparable source of paralysis. I was surprised, I said during our interview, that someone whose entire life constituted a triumph over adversity would join the campaign to insure against précarité. It was early afternoon, and Royal had ushered me into her large, sunny office, whose elegantly rusticized furnishings — a veined leaf pattern repeated in leather and cast iron — offered a cosmopolitan nod at provincial motifs. Politicians, in my experience, generally like to crowd into your space, but Royal took up her post behind her big glass desk, while I sat a distance off, a placement that lent itself more to the issuing of dictums than to the politics of proximity. Royal countered my observation with a familiar refrain: “The problem is that everybody isn’t subject to insecurity. Do you see businessmen being fired for incompetence? The young see politicians, who also have a stable and secure job, being civil servants, lecturing others on insecurity. So the young graduate will say, ‘In the name of what am I going to sign an insecure contract?’ ”
Then the conversation took an odd turn. Royal asked me, with the air of someone pulling out a trump card, “Are you in an insecure situation?” Actually, I explained, as a contract writer for this magazine, I have little security.
Royal wasn’t going to be put off the scent that easily. “Yes, but how many years does your contract last?”
“I sign a new one every year.”
Now she was frankly incredulous. “You could be fired every year?” For all her own experience, Royal apparently viewed précarité as a kind of socioeconomic stigma rather than the price you might choose to pay for freedom. Or maybe you could say that for her, as for the left generally — and not only in France — market liberalism and globalization have the status merely of fact, which is categorically inferior to a right. This is no less so if the fact appears to obviate the right. “The global economy shouldn’t be supported by wage earners,” Royal insisted. “They have to be able to build a future, like any human being.” Royal is not actually opposed to labor-market reform; she advocates the model the Danes call flex-security, in which the state guarantees lifelong training, job placement and unemployment insurance, so that workers can easily move among jobs. But since she is also on record as advocating giant public-works projects, she may be more devoted to the job insurance than the market-sensitive side of this approach.
Some of Royal’s supporters take the optimistic view that her empiricism, her disdain for ideological litmus tests, will ultimately lead her away from the party’s hermetic dogma. One of her most celebrated and least likely advocates, Daniel Cohn-Bendit — Danny the Red, when he manned the barricades of 1968 — suggests just this possibility. Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the Green Party and a rebel to the last, has outraged compatriots old and new by describing himself as a liberal. Cohn-Bendit admits that he has no reason to believe that Royal shares his views, but he also feels, as did so many of the people I spoke to, that French politics has reached a dead end. “You have to create a situation where you’re ready to debate your proposition,” Cohn-Bendit contends, “where you say, ‘We together will decide to take this risk, because there is no easy solution.’ ” Royal has, he says, the inner freedom to take this route. What’s more, he says, “To think of a president with four children and not married — it’s a revolution!”
Seated beside Royal as she was driven back to Poitiers after an annual awards dinner at a sports club, I mentioned that we hadn’t yet discussed some of the major issues she would face as president. What about terrorism? And Iraq? Royal responded with a surprising question of her own: “Would you ask this of a man?”
“Of course I would.”
“If you were interviewing Laurent Fabius, you would never ask him, ‘Can you lay out your planetary vision in 15 minutes?’ ”
