France:Ségolène Royal presented her long-awaited presidential programme in a convention centre near Roissy airport yesterday.
The end of Ms Royal's "listening phase" had been hyped by French media as the crucial moment that would make or break the socialist candidate's campaign.
Ms Royal was running neck and neck with right-wing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy until mid-January, when Mr Sarkozy's party congress and a series of foreign policy gaffes by Ms Royal put him ahead in the polls.
Yet she insisted on completing her experiment in "participative democracy" before drawing up her platform. Ms Royal's staff held 6,500 thematic debates across France. Some 2.7 million people allegedly visited her website, and 135,000 sent written contributions which were sorted by 70 moderators and stirred into the "grand synthesis" of "notebooks of hope" upon which yesterday's speech was based.
The 20 authors of the two-hour speech included the academician Erik Orsenna, once François Mitterrand's ghost writer, the historian Benjamin Stora and former Le Mondeeditor Edwy Plenel. The result was a strange hybrid, combining calls for debt reduction and reform of government bureaucracy with dozens of promises for new welfare spending. French media gave top billing to Ms Royal's pledge to raise the minimum monthly wage to €1,500 in June.
The socialists claimed 15,000 people attended the rally. The audience was more racially mixed and less affluent than the more than 50,000 people who attended Mr Sarkozy's investiture as the UMP candidate on January 14th.
Members of the Socialist Youth Movement - which once opposed Ms Royal - wore red and white T-shirts emblazoned with the words "Proud to be Socialist". Militants from "Ségosphère" - the website created by her son Thomas - and "Désirs d'avenir", her own group within the Socialist Party, wore purple and black T-shirts with the slogan "Tomorrow won't happen without you". The words: "I heard what you told me. We'll do it together" appeared on screen behind her.
Ms Royal called her programme a "presidential pact" and told of Odile and Martine, mothers struggling to raise families in tiny rooms; of a father in Alsace who told her that living on welfare was "like a shameful disease"; a woman in Roubaix who was afraid to go home to her violent husband.
"These silent cries of distress, these poor broken lives, these humiliated families, ravaged by poverty and iniquity, these destinies marked with the seal of a curse that speaks not its name - all this is on my mind as I speak to you..." Ms Royal said.
France is beset by seven crises - of the banlieues, economic, social, educational, moral, ecological and international - she said. She promised to "reconcile the French with business to get France out of deficit-spending and achieve social progress". Reforms would "give a youthful jolt to this . . . excessively centralist state, collapsing under the weight of its years, of useless bureaucracy and over-complex regulations," she promised, sounding remarkably like Mr Sarkozy.
But all resemblance stopped there. Ms Royal went on to promise a catalogue of new state agencies, funds and spending programmes - 100 proposals in all - in the event she is elected.
To stop outsourcing, she would create a "national agency for re-industrialisation". Companies who re-invest profits would receive tax breaks; those who distribute dividends to shareholders would pay higher taxes. She promised "guaranteed purchasing power and lifelong housing" to all. She would immediately raise pensions at the lower end of the scale by 5 per cent, as well as disability benefits. She would build 120,000 low income housing units every year, and require every town to build emergency housing for 1,000 homeless people. A government fund would pay deposits for tenants who could not otherwise rent apartments. Housing left vacant for more than two years could be requisitioned.
Ms Royal promised a diploma and a first job to all young people. She would create 500,000 "trampoline jobs" like the emplois jeunes established by the 1997-2002 Jospin government. Every young person entering active life would receive an "autonomy allowance" (amount unspecified) and a free loan of €10,000. Under her "professional social security" system, the jobless would receive 90 per cent of their last salary for the first year of unemployment.
In Ms Royal's France, medical care would be free to everyone under the age of 16; contraception free to all females under 25.
It was unclear how she would finance so many generous projects. "Public money will be better, more efficiently utilised," she said in her speech. By committing France to "environmental excellence", she would create 100,000 jobs.
In Europe, she promised to reform the Common Agricultural Policy "to reorient aid towards rural development", and to fight unfair competition and outsourcing by establishing minimum levels of corporation tax.
Her foreign policy, based on condemnation of human rights abuses and a stronger "French voice" throughout the world, sounded almost Gaullist.
Two main issues separate her and Mr Sarkozy: the economy and immigration. She wants an economy based on "generosity" and "solidarity"; Mr Sarkozy thinks that means counterproductive hand-outs.
She did not mention Mr Sarkozy once in two hours. François Hollande, her companion and the head of the Socialist Party, did the dirty work of mocking Mr Sarkozy in the speech preceding hers. Alluding to Mr Sarkozy's "France; love it or leave it" slogan, Mr Hollande said: "We love France at least as much as the others, and without asking anyone to leave it."
Mr Sarkozy tried to steal the limelight from Ms Royal on her big day by scheduling a last-minute rally for his support committees in Paris. Mr Hollande said it was the socialists "who represent social peace and harmony". But Mr Sarkozy said he wants to be "the president who reconciles the France that suffers with the France that succeeds".
By early March, President Jacques Chirac is expected to remove a major obstacle to Mr Sarkozy's election by announcing that he will not seek a third term. Mr Chirac took a significant step in that direction in a television programme broadcast last night. "There is without a doubt a life after politics. Until death," he said, as his wife, Bernadette, beamed. Mrs Chirac said she would miss the Élysée Palace, "but I shall adapt. One must accept what fate decides."