The Woman Who Would Be France's President

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Balmy lines like that one are evidence of what sets Royal apart from other French pols. Royal readily acknowledges that her positions would have less appeal if they weren't being laid out by a woman. "It's a symbol of change," she says. "Where men have failed, people think, O.K., maybe we'll try a woman." Stéphane Rozès, one of France's most respected pollsters, says, "She is popular because she's a woman who has a nondoctrinaire stance toward politics. People see her as out to solve problems, while so many others, most of them men, are stuck in the fog of ideology."

Royal is also willing to capitalize on her pulchritude. "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." At a campaign meeting in Paris earlier this year, a man told Royal she looked good. "You're not too bad yourself," she retorted, bringing down the house.

To her opponents, such tactics 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," says former Prime Minister and two-time presidential candidate Lionel Jospin, whose disdain for Royal's approach led him to challenge her for the party nomination. (He withdrew from the race last week, removing a major hurdle for Royal.) An adviser to Strauss-Kahn issues a similar criticism: "What the polls measure is popularity, not competence. Socialists have a furious love of debate, and she's not debating. What does she think about debt, about foreign policy, about economic governance? You've got to talk about this stuff. And you can't talk to party activists like you do to public opinion."

Royal believes that by downplaying ideology, she can attract voters from across France's political spectrum, including former party loyalists who stayed home or drifted to the fringes in the past election. "To win in 2007, the left has to get votes everywhere, even from the [far-right] National Front," she told TIME. "There are 30% of leftist voters who vote for the National Front because they're exasperated--they're in unstable jobs or insecure neighborhoods. Rather than worrying about the center, the left had better work on this working-class constituency, which is casting protest votes for extreme candidates because it is suffering."

Royal knows how to play tough. Born in Dakar, Senegal, the daughter of a French army officer, she grew up as the fourth of eight children in a large house in Lorraine. Her father's regime was a strict one (the family intoned Gregorian chants on Sundays). Royal attended a Catholic boarding school and the University of Nancy before attaining the classical educational polish of the French political élite: a degree from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris and another from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA), where her class included the current Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, and her partner, Socialist Party secretary François Hollande. She met Hollande there in 1978 and had their first child in 1984.