Ségolène Royal
Ségolène Royal is a French politician who took part in the 2007 French presidential election, losing to Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round. She was the first woman in France's history to reach the second round in a presidential election.
Royal was president of the Poitou-Charentes Regional Council from 2004 to 2014. She won the 2006 Socialist Party primary, becoming the first woman in France to be nominated as a presidential candidate by a major party. In the subsequent 2007 presidential election, she earned further distinction as the first woman to qualify for the second round of a presidential election, but ultimately lost to Sarkozy.
In 2008, Royal narrowly lost to Martine Aubry in the Socialist Party's election for First Secretary at the Party's twenty-second national congress. She lost the Socialist Party presidential primary in 2011, and failed in an attempt to win a seat in the National Assembly in the June 2012 parliamentary elections.
She has four children with François Hollande, Sarkozy's successor as president, and was appointed by him to the vice-chair directorship of the Banque Publique d'Investissement in 2013. She served as Minister for Ecology from 2014 to 2017, in the Valls, then Cazeneuve cabinets.
Early life
Marie-Ségolène Royal was born on 22 September 1953 in the military base of Ouakam, Dakar, French West Africa, the daughter of Hélène Dehaye and Jacques Royal, a former artillery officer and aide to the mayor of Chamagne. Her parents had eight children in nine years: Marie-Odette, Marie-Nicole, Gérard, Marie-Ségolène, Antoine, Paul, Henri and Sigisbert.After secondary school in the small town of Melle, Deux-Sèvres, Marie-Ségolène attended a local university where she graduated 2nd in her class with a degree in economics. Her eldest sister then suggested she prepare the entrance exam to the elite Institut d'études politiques de Paris popularly called Sciences Po, which she attended on scholarship. There she discovered politics of class and feminism.
In 1972, at the age of 19, Royal sued her father because he refused to divorce her mother and pay alimony and child support to finance the children's education. She won the case after many years in court, shortly before Jacques Royal died of lung cancer in 1981. Six of the eight children had refused to see him again, Ségolène included.
Royal, like the majority of France's political elite, is a graduate of the École nationale d'administration. She was in the same class as her former partner of 30 years, François Hollande, as well as Dominique de Villepin. Each class year at the ENA receives a nickname to distinguish it: Royal tried to get her peers to name their class after Louise Michel, a revolutionary from the 1870s, but they chose the name "Voltaire" instead. During her time at the ENA, Royal also dropped "Marie" from her hyphenated first name.
Political career
Beginnings
After graduating in 1980, she elected to serve as a judge of an administrative court before she was noticed by President François Mitterrand's special adviser Jacques Attali and recruited to his staff in 1982. She held the junior rank of chargée de mission from 1982 to 1988.Member of the French National Assembly
She decided to become a candidate for the 1988 legislative election; she registered in the rural, Western Deux-Sèvres Département. Her candidacy was an example of the French political tradition of parachutage, appointing promising "Parisian" political staffers as candidates in provincial districts to test their mettle. She was up against an entrenched UDF incumbent, and Mitterrand is said to have told her: "You will not win, but you will next time." Straddling strongly Catholic and Protestant areas, that district had been held by conservatives since World War II.She did win against the odds, and remarked: "Pour un parachutage, l'atterrissage est réussi.".
After this election, she served as representative in the National Assembly for the Deux-Sèvres' 2nd constituency.
Ministerial offices
- Minister of Environment: 1992–1993.
- Minister of School Education: 1997–2000.
- Minister of Family and Children: 2000–2001.
- Minister of Family, Children and Disabled persons: 2001–2002.
President of the Region Poitou-Charentes
2007 presidential candidacy
On 22 September 2005, Paris Match published an interview in which she declared that she was considering running for the presidency in 2007. In 2006 the CPE laws were proposed with large protests as a result. Rather than going to the organised protest, she voted a law in her "région" whereby no company using that type of contract would receive the Région's subsidies. The government backed down and stated that the law would be put on the statute book, but that it would not be applied. After this event Royal was tipped as the lead contender in what is dubbed the "Sarko-Ségo" race against Nicolas Sarkozy.By the beginning of September 2006, her intentions had become quite clear. She has said that only widespread sexism in the Socialist Party had prevented it from rallying around her candidacy as it would have had she been a man. She announced an official team to promote her campaign on 30 August. At this point, polls showed her to be much more popular than her closest competitor, former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, and other Socialist heavyweights Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Jack Lang, another former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius and François Hollande.
Her status as a presidential candidate became more likely on 28 September 2006, when Lionel Jospin, the Socialist former Prime Minister and a fixture in French politics for nearly three decades, announced that he would not run after all. Jack Lang followed suit. On 16 November, Royal defeated Laurent Fabius and Dominique Strauss-Kahn in the French Socialist Party primary, becoming the party's candidate for the 2007 presidential election. The Socialist party's members voted 60.69% for her and gave a bit under 20% each to the more traditional contenders. She also won in 101 of 104 of the Socialist Party's fédérations, losing only Haute-Corse, Mayotte and Seine-Maritime.
One of her top advisors, Éric Besson, resigned soon afterwards over a disagreement about the costs of this programme, which he believes could reach €35 billion, while others in the campaign team wanted to delay bringing out that figure. This led to an unusually bitter fall-out, and Mr Besson writing a book titled Qui connaît Madame Royal ?, published on 20 March. In it, Besson accuses Royal of being a populist, an authoritarian and a luddite and says that he will not vote for her and hopes that she is not elected. He then went on to join the Sarkozy campaign and was rewarded with a junior position in the next government on 18 May 2007.
Following the first round of the presidential election, she faced Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round of voting on 6 May in a two-way runoff.
In the final round of voting on Sunday, 6 May, Sarkozy won the presidency with 53% of the vote. Royal conceded defeat and wished Sarkozy the best, requesting he keep her supporters in mind.
Royal later revealed she had offered defeated centrist candidate, François Bayrou, the premiership should she be elected.
2008 Socialist Party leadership election
Royal entered the leadership election of the Socialist Party to replace her former common law husband François Hollande as head of the party. She garnered the largest plurality of votes in the first round of voting, but not enough to win outright; she was eventually narrowly defeated in the second round by rival Martine Aubry by the margin of 42 votes. After a vote recount, Aubry was declared the winner 25 November 2008, with the margin widening to 102 votes. Royal has announced her intentions to contest the result. Royal has blamed party leaders and her former partner for her loss in the 2007 election.2011 Socialist Party presidential primary
Royal ran in the French Socialist Party presidential primary election of 2011, the party's first ever open primary. She arrived 4th in the first round on 9 October 2011 with a mere 6.95% of votes, considerably below the figures suggested by opinion polls.Defeat in the 2012 legislative election
In 2012, Royal ran for office representing Charente-Maritime's 1st constituency. She lost the election to a PRG candidate, Olivier Falorni.After her separation with Hollande, political relations between them were tense, though they have both stated that they remained friends. In the 2008 Socialist Party leadership election, Hollande backed another candidate, and Royal has blamed him and the party establishment for her 2007 Presidential defeat.
2014 return to government
On 2 April 2014, Royal was appointed Minister of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy in the second cabinet of Prime Minister Manuel Valls. In January 2015 she was third in line in governmental rank, after the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister.Increasingly, commentators have seen Royal as President François Hollande’s stand-in for some important state occasions. When Pope Francis touched down on French soil for the first time in his papacy with a visit to the European Parliament in Strasbourg in November 2014, Royal was the senior French official there to greet him. After the deadly attacks against a satirical newspaper and a kosher supermarket in January 2015, she travelled to Israel to represent France at the memorial services.
In 2016 Royal promised to install 1,000 km of 'solar roadways' in the next five years. One kilometre was installed in Normandie, and after producing about a quarter of the power predicted, was mostly torn up inside three years.