Where's the Gray Suit?

When the members of the French socialist Party held their summer seminar in the pretty coast town of La Rochelle last month, they discussed the sort of topics that only a true policy wonk could love. Does there need to be "a new equilibrium between labor and capital"? Is Latin America "the new horizon of socialism"? [an error occurred while processing this directive] Behind the high-toned banter, however, lay a visceral political yearning.

France's left has not held the nation's presidency since 1995, and it is hungry for power. It might be thought odd, then, that the person who has the strongest chance of winning the top office in next May's presidential election didn't take part in any of the earnest, furrowed-brow debates. Sure, Ségolène Royal was there at the beginning of the proceedings (she's the President of Poitou-Charentes, La Rochelle's region) and she was there at the end, smiling at the jokes in the closing speech of François Hollande, the party secretary — and, to complicate matters, her partner (they are not married) and the father of her four children.

But while her colleagues were laying out their views on everything from the minimum wage to how to give the European Union more heft, Royal, who turns 53 this month, was seen on a ferry boat, on a live TV interview and at a posh portside restaurant. "As the leader of the race, it's not her job to bat around ideas with the challengers," explained Malek Boutih, a member of the party's National Secretariat. "She has to concentrate her power for the battle ahead against the right."

Many are keen to remind her that it isn't yet her battle to lead. Party members will not choose their standard bearer until November. But opinion polls suggest Royal is by far the most popular of the left's possible candidates, and the only one who could beat Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, leader and all-but-anointed candidate of the main party of the right, the Union for a Popular Movement. Deliberately, Royal is avoiding a direct battle with her party rivals, an indication, her campaign advisers insist, of her determination to create a new political dynamic in a France aching for change, one that depends on a direct connection to the voter. She has spurned ideological litmus tests in favor of a politics that helps people "construct their lives and the happiness of their loved ones," as she said recently to a massive crowd in Burgundy. That, say her aides, is evidence of the thing that most clearly sets Royal apart. She's a woman.

In the view of Royal's supporters, her worst enemies and the lady herself, femininity is key to her success. Royal readily acknowledges that her policies would have less of a pull 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." Her position has only been strengthened by the disdain she's drawn from rivals like former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, who archly asked last year, "Who will take care of the children?" She doesn't duck the obvious fact that, in a nation whose politics is run by men in suits, she is different. "Why," she asked in a recent interview with Time, "should one have to be sad, ugly and boring to go into politics these days?"