Where's the Gray Suit?

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TOM HALEY / SIPA SMILES: Can Ségolène Royal's unashamedly feminine style get her elected?

Why indeed? But the true surprise, perhaps, is that France has seen nothing quite like Royal before. She seeks to lead a nation that makes a big deal of honoring and supporting its women. In no European country outside Scandinavia do women make up as large a proportion of the workforce as in France — thanks in part to a generous system of maternity support, which has also given France Europe's second highest fertility rate, behind only Ireland.

Women run France's Defense Ministry, one of its most prestigious math programs, the world's biggest builder of nuclear power plants, the national theater and the employers' federation (see Leading Ladies). With all that — plus an abiding conceit that it epitomizes the avant-garde — France should have been among the first countries to see a woman in its highest political office. Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of Britain in 1979, Gro Harlem Brundtland served three terms in Norway from 1981. Germany's glass ceiling was smashed last year with the election of Angela Merkel. India has had a woman leader, as have Bangladesh, New Zealand, Israel and Chile — why not France?

Because in gender as in so much else, French politicians talk a better game than they play. To be sure, in May 1991 President François Mitterrand appointed France's first and only female Prime Minister, Edith Cresson — but she was tossed aside in less than a year. Jacques Chirac's party was led for three years by Michèle Alliot-Marie, now the Defense Minister, who is as formidable a politician as Royal and would be a potential presidential candidate herself if Sarkozy didn't have his party's nomination sewn up. But on the whole, the French political parties remain clannish clusters of ideological currents owing fealty to male leaders. "All the polls show French society to be very open to the idea of a woman President," says Françoise Gaspard, a feminist sociologist and former Socialist Deputy. "But the political parties are still very archaic, controlled by men who can't stand the idea. The fact that Ségolène is no longer acting as a 'comrade' but as a rival is completely astonishing for them, and completely insufferable."

There's a history to this. French women weren't granted the right to vote or stand in national elections until 1944, a generation after women in the U.S. and most of the rest of Europe. Since 2000, all political parties have had to present as many female as male candidates on their electoral lists. Yet only 12% of the current members of the National Assembly are women, compared with 20% in Britain's House of Commons and 45% in Sweden's Parliament. (With women making up just 15% of the House of Representatives, the U.S. has only a slightly better record than France.)

With traditional politics hidebound, Royal has tended to bypass party fixtures and go straight to the people. "Her strategy, which she exercises with no scruples, is one of seduction, and that's a new thing in French politics," says Régine Lemoine-Darthois, co-author of a recent book about women of Royal's generation titled An Age Called Desire. "She holds up a mirror to French women that they find very agreeable: to knock men dead while being a woman of power. She's proof that you don't have to abandon your femininity to make it." No kidding. At a meeting in Paris earlier this year, a man told Royal she looked good. "You're not too bad yourself," she retorted. Her arsenal includes the occasional girlish giggle, a disarming smile and a sartorial penchant for pure white.

To her opponents in the party, those are unfair tactics, ones that mask an ideological emptiness that will show up sooner or later. "Technique doesn't replace politics; there have to be ideas, convictions, a discussion of the stakes," said Lionel Jospin, who, you might have thought, would have had the decency to stay silent: Jospin was so disastrous a Socialist presidential candidate in 2002 that he was beaten in the first round of voting not just by Chirac but by the far-right demagogue Jean-Marie le Pen.