Royal: a busted flush?

Ségolène Royal, according to one French view of the early presidential skirmishing, was streets ahead until she started appearing too much in public and, especially, too much on the box.

She still looks somewhat more electable than Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius*. But the three televised debates with them have seen public support for Ségolène, if not quite drifting away, faltering.

We can probably assume that she will still pick up the socialist party nomination later this month, at worst after being forced into a deciding second round.

But each blip in the opinion polls, which are concerned mostly with how she is doing in the internal race, adds to doubts about her ability to defeat Nicolas Sarkozy in the real presidency poll next spring.

Did she peak far too soon? Is there really nothing more to her than that she is female, fresh and - despite that ministerial role under Mitterrand - semi-detached from the dismal record of the tired old socialist bigwigs - the so-called party elephants?

In truth, it has become increasingly difficult to raise huge enthusiasm for either of the Elysée frontrunners. The best thing going for both of them, it often seems, is that they are not the far Right menace Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Sarko sometimes only appears to be serious when he promises the change France self-evidently needs. There is, after all, little sign that up with such change the French will wish to put.

Yet the more in depth the profile of Mme Royal in one of the heavyweight French political weeklies, the less appealing are some of her characteristics.

As I have noted elsewhere, not everyone who has had close dealings with her is left feeling happier as a result.

Some of her critics in the Parti Socialiste have shown themselves to be absurd, malicious or sexist. Hands up the mean-minded rival who nicknamed her chikungunya after the vicious mosquito-borne illness that affected 250,000 people, killing 250 of them, on the French island of La Réunion.

But too many stories of her single-minded pursuit of power are in circulation for all to be untrue. And she did herself no favours with her tetchy put-down of that girl who asked a tough question at an August party gathering in Brittany.

Ségolène impressed me on the one occasion we met, and I like to think I was a little ahead of the game in spotting her electoral potential. I'd enjoy meeting her again. But even when I was employed, the response from her people was much as it usually is from Sarko's: you've got no votes, why should s/he give you any time?

It does not seem right for France's election campaign to have started so early, and I am not convinced that the French public have much of an appetite for six more months of the same. Most can take only so much of Sarko; the socialist alternatives to Ségolène are scarcely calculated to inspire.

A few more days remain for Ségolène to stamp her authority on the race for the socialist ticket. If she somehow manages to grasp defeat from victory's jaws, we face being bored to death - or reduced to holding our noses and praying for Le Pen to make it to the second round again and at least make the elections worth talking about.

* Simply cannot get this to link to either of my Beauty vs the Elephants blog postings at the Telegraph site in August. Go to the Telegraph blogs home page, click on foreign and then you find me as "archived" at the bottom of the list of foreign correspondents. Use the search facility - Segolene is all you type in - from there.