Things get messy in the press for the media's political pin-up girl.
PARIS October 3, 2006 (Scotsman) - THE scandal surrounding France's 1985 bombing of the Rainbow Warrior resurfaced yesterday... Ms Royal said she was "a bit surprised at all this controversy springing up just after I declared my candidacy. I don't know if it's a coincidence."She said that if there was anything new to be said on the issue, the defence ministry should say it, and she praised her brother Gerard as a "great soldier".
Why is this story being given leash as if Mlle. Royal personally instructed her brother to plant the bomb?
"I have no opinion on the brothers, sisters, aunts or cousins of Segolene Royal," said François Bayrou [deputy for Pyrénées-Atlantiques (2ème)], the leader of the centre-right UDF. On the left, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, also a contender for the Socialist candidacy, said: "No-one is reponsible for what their father, brother or sister does."
THE ROYAL FAMILY HAS A PUBLIC FEUD
MARSEILLES October 1, 2006 (Times Online) - Hostile scrutiny of the Royal family has intensified as enemies of the Socialist frontrunner try to derail her campaign.Her uncle Pierre Royal, a retired general, attacked her in public for demonising her father Jacques, who died of cancer in 1982.
... "I reproach her," said the uncle, "for having publicly damaged the image of her father by treating him as a dictator. That does not correspond to the truth. She is rewriting history in her favour."
He believed that Royal, who also has two sisters, had painted an unflattering portrait of her father because it was "frowned upon in the Socialist party to have a military, Catholic father".
Paul Royal, another brother, voiced similar misgivings. "The idea of a nasty father and a nice mother is too simplistic," he said.
Mlle. Royal simpliste ? We are...shocked!
The "anyone but Royal" campaign points to her family’s military background as an explanation for her tough language. Serge Hefez, a psychiatrist, said she seemed "unconsciously to be copying the rigid authority of her father with whom she was nevertheless in conflict".
Yes, well, nothing like a little off-the-cuff psychoanalysis by a just-taking-a-guess physician to cut a little political throat.* Perhaps all this would be relevant if Mlle. Royal were running as a disaffected teenager.
We remind our French pals that this is exactly the sort of shallow gossipy politicking they find so American, so, ah, shallow. Of course, politics are in great part shallow and gossipy. That the French pretend every French citizen is a serious and skilled polemicist, that French political debate is informed and exacting, well, such pretensions have never been borne out by the facts. But the French so love this conceit they think it true. They, much like you and we, must be baffled by the mess that is France following all that enlightened debate amongst the French polity.
Sadly, the most worrying, most baleful report for the Royal campaign was the most intimate:
[Co-progenitor and PS First Secretary François Hollande] was said to be depressed at the way Royal had trampled over his own presidential ambitions. Le Parisien newspaper quoted him as saying:"I am living a tragedy."
M. Hollande has removed himself from presidential consideration. Ah, M. Hollande, politics ain't beanbag. N'est-ce pas ?
* Consider for a moment the subtexts of these remarks and it is not hard to see how the French are manoeuvred into situations like this.
PFFT (What is this?): Hardball 3¾ | Rayonnement français 0
