SOCIALIST POLITICIAN Ségolène Royal is at the centre of a mud-slinging match sparked off by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s luncheon indiscretions last week.
“The wife of Zorro”, as an African newspaper recently called her, or la Zapatera, as she was known in the 2007 presidential campaign, Ms Royal has raised hackles on the French right – and a few on the left – by asking forgiveness for statements made by Mr Sarkozy.
It all started when Mr Sarkozy told a bipartisan group of deputies and senators that US president Barack Obama was inexperienced, German chancellor Angela Merkel had no choice but to follow in his footsteps and the Spanish prime minister José Luis Zapatero was “perhaps not very intelligent”.
What Mr Sarkozy actually meant, most sources now agree, was that Mr Zapatero was more clever than French socialists, because he wins elections. The president’s irony though was lost on the Spanish media, who turned the perceived slight into a national cause.
Enter Ms Royal, failed presidential candidate and more recently failed candidate for the leadership of the Socialist Party.
Pardon, pardon, Ms Royal wrote to the Spanish prime minister at the weekend, asking forgiveness for the “offensive remarks made by Nicolas Sarkozy”. According to a statement on Ms Royal’s website, she assured Mr Zapatero “that these remarks did not commit France nor the French”.
Ms Royal “believes that exercising the mandate of President of the Republic imposes the duty to master one’s language and behaviour so as not to harm the interests of France,” the statement ends preachily.
On April 6th in Dakar, Ms Royal evoked a speech which Mr Sarkozy made 20 months ago in the same city, in which he said that “African man has not entered into history”. He was accused of racism then, though not by Ms Royal.
“Pardon for these humiliating words, which should never have been spoken, and which did not commit France,” Ms Royal said in Dakar.
The cartoonist Willem summed up the reaction to Ms Royal’s sorties with a cartoon in yesterday’s Libération newspaper. “I apologise in advance for his next gaffe,” says the sign that Ms Royal holds over Mr Sarkozy’s head.
Mr Sarkozy’s watchdogs accused her of seeking publicity and refusing to accept that she lost the election. She “needs psychological help”, said Frédéric Lefebvre, spokesman for the UMP. Ms Royal’s spokeswoman, Najat Belkacem, said she is considering suing Mr Lefebvre.
Mr Lefebvre attacked Ms Royal again yesterday when it was announced that she had lost a supreme court appeal against two former employees who successfully sued her for non-payment of salaries.
Mr Lefebvre told the AFP he thought Ms Royal made the Dakar speech and wrote to Mr Zapatero to divert attention from the court case. “The UMP asks Madame Royal to say pardon to her former employees, who are victims of her non-observance of the laws of the republic,” he added.
Mr Lefebvre was equally scathing towards Libération, which published the original account of Mr Sarkozy’s lunch with the parliamentarians, calling it a “tract” which “after losing its readers, is losing its credibility”.
The newspaper’s editor Laurent Joffrin struck back yesterday, saying he stood by every word of the story, which was based on interviews with several deputies, some of whom took notes.
In a scarcely veiled attack on the right-wing Le Figaro newspaper, Joffrin denounced “these vassal journalists for whom a denial by the Élysée is a certificate of truth.
“They have for a long time confused news and submission, going into the doghouse at the master’s first admonition, then barking with zeal, not against the government, but against those who criticise it.”
The Socialist Party supported Ms Royal over the Dakar speech, but was reluctant to defend her in the run-in about Mr Zapatero.
Jack Lang, a former socialist minister, yesterday told Europe 1 radio station that Ms Royal made a faux pas. “I want to tell our Spanish friends: forgive her. How can you, on the basis of unverified rumours which were disputed by participants at the lunch, address yourself to the head of the Spanish government in the name of France?”
Ms Royal apparently wants to ensure that she – not the centrist François Bayrou, socialist leader Martine Aubry, nor the darling of the far left Olivier Besancenot – is perceived as chief opponent to Mr Sarkozy. By attacking the president on foreign policy, his sole preserve, she portrays herself as a shadow president.
Mr Zapatero has wisely refused to comment on Mr Sarkozy’s remarks or on the missive he received from Ms Royal.