Ségolène Royal

Ségolène Royal (2012)

Marie-Ségolène Royal , shortly Segolene Royal [ segɔˌlɛn ʀwajal Segolene Royal ^{? / i} ] (born September 22, 1953 in Dakar , French West Africa ; today Senegal ), is a French politician . She was a candidate for the Parti socialiste (PS) for the 2007 presidential election . When she ran again in 2011, she only achieved 6.95% in the primary elections and thus lost to François Hollande . Royal was from 1988 to 2007 a member of parliament for the Deux-Sèvres department and from 2004 to 2014 he was Chair of the Regional Council of Poitou-Charentes . From April 2014 to May 2017 she was Minister for the Environment, Sustainable Development and Energy in governments under President François Hollande, with whom she was in a relationship for almost three decades until 2007.

biography

Ségolène Royal on a visit to Reunion Island in 2006

As the daughter of the officer Jacques Royal and his wife Hélène Dehaye, she grew up in a Catholic environment. She completed her school years first in Charmes , then in Épinal . Later she graduated from the University of Nancy their License in Economics.

She is a graduate of the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (IEP), or Sciences Po for short , and a graduate of the École nationale d'administration (ENA), graduate class Voltaire. After this training, she decided to work as a judicial officer at the Paris Administrative Court. At the ENA, she met François Hollande, who later became chairman of the PS and, from May 15, 2012 to May 14, 2017, President of France , who became her partner in the late 1970s. Four children emerged from the partnership. On June 17, 2007, Royal announced the split from Hollande.

Like her partner Hollande, she was "discovered" as a judge at the Administrative Court by Jacques Attali and was an advisor in the General Secretariat of the President from 1982 to 1988, initially responsible for youth and sport and later for social affairs. A little later she joined the PS. In 1988, President François Mitterrand sent her as a candidate to the conservative Deux-Sèvres department , where she was surprisingly elected Member of the National Assembly with a result of 50.57 percent . With opinions z. For example, against summer time , against the glorification of violence in the media or for designations of origin of cheese and other regional agricultural products, it has since been present in the French public. She has signed various appeals from the political clubs of Jacques Delors , of which Hollande was Secretary General.

On April 4, 1992, Ségolène Royal was appointed Environment Minister in the Bérégovoy cabinet under Pierre Bérégovoy . After the left's defeat in the parliamentary elections in 1993 , she left office with the resignation of the government on March 29, 1993. Royal then resumed her mandate in the National Assembly, which she had resigned when she entered government, but into which she had been re-elected in the general election.

In 1994, Royal was admitted to the Paris Bar and joined a law firm.

Royal at their last session in the Nantes Congress in November 2006

Your plan to be elected chairman of the French National Assembly in 1997 failed in favor of Laurent Fabius . Instead, she was appointed by Lionel Jospin as Assistant Minister for School Education in the Education Ministry of Claude Allègre ( Jospin cabinet ). During her term of office from June 1997 to March 2000, she fought with a large-scale campaign against the so-called Bizutage , which was widespread in the military and university sectors of Francophone countries, and achieved the criminalization of these humiliating initiation rites. With the slogan she issued, “to give more to those who have the least”, she started a development program for priority schools with social and performance- specific difficulties in urban problem areas (“  zone d'éducation prioritaires  ” - in short: ZEP) .

Since Royal employed on the occasion of the campaign for the elections for the General Council of the Départements Deux-Sèvres employees without pay, she was convicted in 1999 by a labor court in Niort ; an appeal was rejected by the Poitiers Court of Appeal in 2005.

As part of a cabinet reshuffle, on March 27, 2000, Royal changed to the position of Assistant Minister for Family and Childhood (from March 27, 2001: Assistant Minister for Family, Childhood and Disabled People) in the Ministry of Labor and Employment for a short time under Martine Aubry , then under Élisabeth Guigou. In this role, she had laws on paternity leave, grants at the start of the school year and the fight against prostitution of minors successfully put to the vote. With the resignation of the Jospin government, she resigned on May 6, 2002.

In the parliamentary elections in 2002 , Royal successfully applied as a member of the Deux-Sèvres department . In 2004 she ran as the top candidate of the Parti Socialiste in the election of the regional council of Poitou-Charentes. In the election campaign she was nicknamed Zapatera  - after the Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero . In the election, she was able to prevail against her predecessor Elisabeth Morin ( UMP ) with 46.29 percent .

Candidate for the 2007 presidential election

Ségolène Royal at a PS event in Halle Carpentier, Paris, 6 February 2007

From mid-2006 until she was defeated with 47 percent of the vote behind Nicolas Sarkozy (53 percent) in the runoff election on May 6, 2007, Royal ran an election campaign tailored to her personality with the aim of winning the 2007 presidential election and becoming the first woman president of the To become French Republic. In the first ballot, she won second place out of a total of twelve presidential candidates with 25.84 percent of the votes cast. This was the highest result of a PS presidential candidate in almost 20 years.

Within the party, Royal had prevailed on November 16, 2006 within the Parti socialiste (PS) as the top candidate for the 2007 presidential election with 60.62 percent of the vote against Laurent Fabius (18.54 percent) and Dominique Strauss-Kahn (20.83 percent) . Of the 218,000 members entitled to vote, a surprising 82.04 percent took part, with Royal able to score points above all among the 70,000 new party members.

Unlike the male party colleagues among the competitors, she avoided public stipulations at the beginning of the election campaign and spoke more of basic political values ​​such as “just order” or “honorable use of power”. This clearly differed from the party-loyal “presidential” program of its internal party rivals Fabius and Strauss-Kahn, which in some cases earned it strong criticism in the party. Her supporters, on the other hand, said she wanted to distance herself from the statements made by Fabius and Strauss-Kahn in order to align her political profile with a bipartisan majority in the population. When Lionel Jospin renounced the top candidacy for the presidency at the end of September 2006, Royals chances increased significantly. Since then, outside of her party, she has been taken seriously as a candidate for the highest office in France by rivals Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin , who had previously spoken of a mere media campaign.

Campaign footage from the 2007 presidential election

After her nomination as the socialists' official candidate for the 2007 presidential election, Royal continued to campaign with personal accents, in some cases against her party, which did not damage her popularity among the party base despite some criticism from within the party. At that time, she founded an association called Désirs d'avenir (German for "longing for the future"), which was supposed to involve party members and interested citizens alike in the political debate. This association continued to exist quite successfully even after the presidential election was lost and formed the royal basis for further political projects.

After several faux pas in the election campaign (among other things, she had emphasized the “sovereignty and freedom” of the Canadian province of Quebec during a conversation with the Canadian politician André Boisclair ), the polling institutes IPSOS and CSA determined falling polls for the candidate. In addition, Royal failed to provide an explanation as to how the additional social benefits that it requested should be financed. Against this background, Royal announced on February 18 a reorganization of its election campaign strategy.

Unexpected indirect campaign support for the runoff election on May 6, 2007, Royal did not receive the conservative Gaullists Sarkozy (UMP) from the center politician François Bayrou ( UDF ), who ranked third in the first ballot and who had announced shortly before the runoff between Sarkozy and Royal choose. This could be one reason why she received only six percentage points less than Sarkozy on May 6, 2007.

Despite this defeat, she called it her duty to lead the socialists into the parliamentary election campaign. However, before the presidential election, she herself had refused to run again as a member of parliament. She caused a polemic in June 2007 after she herself described her political program as not "credible" ("crédible") in a television program. Above all, she mentioned the transfer of the 35-hour working week to all companies and the increase in the minimum wage to 1,500 euros per month.

Ségolène Royal (2009)

Fight for party leadership

At the party conference in Reims in November 2008 , Ségolène Royal applied for chairmanship of the PS. When there was a duel with Martine Aubry in the second ballot , all the eliminated candidates supported the latter to prevent Royals from winning. In the runoff election, Royal Aubry was initially defeated by 42 votes out of around 67,000. The Royal camp accused the party leadership and the Aubrys camp of manipulating the elections. The party leadership then had a recount carried out, which confirmed Aubry's victory, with a slightly larger margin of 102 votes; this result was subsequently confirmed by the party congress.

The announcement by the Royal camp to challenge the result in public courts was dropped in the course of the following months. The relationship between the two politicians has been disrupted since this dispute, even if there have been gestures of reconciliation in between.

Presidential and Parliamentary elections 2012

In November 2010, Ségolène Royal announced in interviews with the press for the 2012 presidential election that she was applying for a new candidacy for the Parti Socialiste . She was eliminated from the Parti Socialiste in the first round of the open primaries , with only 7 percent of the vote. Before the runoff election on October 16, she spoke out in favor of François Hollande .

In the French parliamentary elections in 2012 , Ségolène Royal applied in the first constituency of the Charente-Maritime department . She announced that she would run for the presidency of parliament in the event of an election to the National Assembly. After she was still in the lead in the first ballot, Royal was defeated in the runoff election with 37 percent of the vote to the socialist dissident Olivier Falorni , who had refused to withdraw his own application for her.

Environment and Energy Minister 2014

On March 31, 2014, the Ayrault II cabinet resigned after poor results in the local elections in March 2014. President François Hollande appointed Manuel Valls as the new French Prime Minister ; Valls appointed Valls' cabinet on April 2, 2014 , including Ségolène Royal as France's Environment and Energy Minister . Her predecessor was (since July 2, 2013) Philippe Martin . She retained this position in the Valls II cabinet . When the Valls II cabinet was reshuffled, it was speculated that she could be appointed foreign minister. This did not happen, but during the restructuring their portfolio was expanded to include the responsibility for negotiating an international climate agreement, which had previously been part of the Foreign Ministry.

Political positions

The following political positions were represented by Ségolène Royal in a keynote address in the Paris suburb of Villepinte on February 12, 2007; she called her "100 proposals" on her political positions as a presidential candidate:

Participatory Democracy

Royal raised the principle of participatory democracy (“ la démocratie participative  ”) to the model of its political agenda (  including new forms of communication on the Internet, blogs and forums) . On the basis of her observation that political France was going through a loss of credibility and a deep democratic crisis because of the increasing detachment of its government from the citizens, she called on politicians to rely more on the ability of citizens to bring their personal expertise to the political process; in doing so, it wanted to involve citizens more directly in the process of making decisions that affect them, both at national and regional level. Mobilizing this collective intelligence would bring unadulterated results. The autism and arrogance of the government wouldn't work. Royal justified this model of democracy with her educational policy experience in the regional council of Poitou-Charentes , where she implemented her concept of participatory democracy in around 50 Lycées by including pupils, parents and staff in the budget policy of the educational institutions, also with the help of the Internet.

Foreign policy

In foreign policy , Ségolène Royal criticized in particular the superficiality of the doctrine of the axis of evil formulated by the US administration under George W. Bush . Preventive wars would make problems worse than solve them. In a program debate in Frangy-en-Bresse on August 20, 2006, ahead of her application for the presidency, there is no one other than George Bush who is of the opinion that the world has become safer since the occupation of Iraq. Ségolène Royal was open to a possible Turkish accession to the European Union if Turkey fulfilled the accession conditions .

In the conflict over the Iranian nuclear program , Royal called on Tehran to stop uranium enrichment; she rejected any unilateral action against Iran. In previous statements, she had also called for the country to renounce the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

She spoke out in favor of a boycott of the 2008 Olympic Games in China in order to criticize China's Africa policy.

European Union

In matters of European integration , Royal took a stand against a renewed ratification of the European Constitutional Treaty in the version of the Constitutional Convention that had been rejected by the majority of the French:

“Our perspective is a social, political and ecological Europe. There is of course no question for the socialists to propose again the ratification of a constitutional treaty that the French people have rejected. Our program foresees proposing the drafting of a short constitutional text aimed at better organizing and democratizing the European institutions and giving them clear responsibilities. After a one-time negotiation, it would have to be subjected to a referendum. I see two major construction sites for this Europe, which has to prove itself: environment and research "
[Original:"  Je vois deux chantiers majeurs pour cette Europe par la preuve: l'environnement et la recherche  "]

State constitution

Against the background of the debate about constitutional reform , Royal advocated a “VI. Republic ” , whose constitution essentially provides for a distribution and equalization of the concentration of power in the centralized state at the expense of the French President and in favor of the National Assembly. Based on the personalized proportional representation in Germany , she spoke out in favor of introducing elements of party proportional representation into French electoral law. According to this, between 80 and 160 mandates should no longer be awarded by direct election - as was previously the case for each member of the National Assembly - but should be elected to parliament via a party list. At the same time, the National Assembly was to be enlarged from 577 to around 600 seats and a ban on the accumulation of offices was to be enforced. Furthermore, Royal proposed a restriction on the use of emergency legislation in conjunction with a parliamentary consultation requirement in the event of an upcoming foreign deployment of the armed forces. The re-election of the French President for a further five-year term of office, which was possible several times under the previous constitutional law, should be limited to one re-election. The Conseil constitutionnel , the French constitutional court (translated actually: Constitutional Council ), should be merged into a Cour constitutionnelle : In this court of justice 3 of the 15 judges (currently 9) should continue to be appointed by the President, 9 by the Assemblée nationale and 3 by the Senate elected by a two-thirds majority. Finally, the strengthening of direct democratic instruments was envisaged in their program, for example through the proposed introduction of a referendum with an admission threshold of one million or ten percent of eligible voters.

Youth and Integration

Ségolène Royal was and is considered controversial even within the Socialist Party - regardless of its 2007 presidential candidacy, which the party supported, albeit in vain. In order to improve social integration for young people , she called for "military-style educational institutions" in which "young people are taken by the hand". Adults should "encourage them to work, which will increase young people's self-confidence".

Energy policy

Ségolène Royal spoke out in favor of closing the controversial Fessenheim nuclear power plant in Alsace if she became president. She announced this in a letter to the citizens' initiative “Stop Fessenheim”. In the letter, Royal stated that it shared concerns about the safety of the facility. In this context, she called for more economical and efficient energy consumption and increased support for the use of renewable energies.

Her party's election manifesto aims to reduce the share of nuclear energy in electricity generation in France from currently 80 percent to 50 percent in 2017, Royal announced. The Alsatian nuclear power plant in Fessenheim only contributes two and a half percent to total French electricity generation, according to Royal. That is why it is already "possible and desirable" to close the two reactors as quickly as possible. Fessenheim is the oldest French nuclear power plant.

As Environment Minister between 2014 and 2017, Royal pushed ahead with the closure of Fessenheim, announced by President Hollande.

Intellectual property

In May 2006, Royal spoke out clearly against expanding intellectual property. She criticized the French implementation of the EU directive on copyright as "simplifying" and "running counter to the interests of authors and the public". The Chirac government did not understand the legalities of the digital age and the amendment inappropriately restricted innovation and freedoms through the unilateral and unrestricted granting of new monopoly rights by digital rights management .

Mandates

Government functions

• 1992–1993: Minister for the Environment in the government of Pierre Bérégovoy
• 1997–2000: Assistant Minister for Schools in the Ministry of Education led by Claude Allègre under the government of Lionel Jospin
• 2000–2001: Assistant Minister for Family, Childhood and People with Disabilities in the “Ministry for Labor and Solidarity” of the government of Lionel Jospin, led by Martine Aubry
• 2001–2002: Assistant Minister for Family, Childhood and People with Disabilities in the “Ministry of Labor and Solidarity” of the government of Lionel Jospin, led by Élisabeth Guigou
• 2014–2017: Minister for Environment, Sustainability and Energy in the government of Manuel Valls

Electoral mandates

At national level:

• 1988–1992: Member of the National Assembly for the Deux-Sèvres department , until assuming government functions
• 1993–1997: Member of the National Assembly for the Deux-Sèvres department until assuming government functions
• 2002–2007: Member of the National Assembly for the Deux-Sèvres department

Functions at local / regional level

• 1989–1995: Member of the Melle municipal council (Deux-Sèvres department)
• 1995–2001: Member of the municipal council of Niort (Deux-Sèvres)
• 1992–1998: Member of the General Council of the Deux-Sèvres department
• 1992: Member of the Poitou-Charentes Regional Council until he took over government functions
• 2004–2014: President of the Poitou-Charentes Regional Council
• Chair of a rural initiative to preserve the marshland around Poitiers, since 1990

Functions at party level

• Since 2008: Deputy Chairwoman of the Socialist International

literature

• Heiko Engelkes : Ségolène Royal. A woman on the way to power. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-351-02648-6 .

Web links

Commons : Ségolène Royal  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Royals official archive page at the French National Assembly (French).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Cabinet Mignard, Teitgen, Grisoni & associés. Source: droit-inc.fr
2. ↑ ^{a b} Final result of the internal election of the Socialist Party on November 16, 2006 (PDF; 80 kB)
3. ^ Website of the Désirs d'Avenir initiative (French).
4. ^ Philippe Sauvagnargues: Des propos de Ségolène Royal sur le Québec provoquent des remous au Canada ( Memento of January 23, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). Yahoo! Actualités France, January 23, 2007 (French).
5. ^ Ségolène Royal announcement une "nouvelle organization" de campagne. In: Le Monde . February 18, 2007 (French).
6. ↑ Ségolène Royal glossed over their defeat. Entitlement to leadership of the French socialists , NZZ of May 8, 2007.
7. ↑ Segolene Royal affirme avoir dû défendre des idées qu'elle ne jugeait "pas crédibles"
8. ↑ Ségolène Royal irrite à gauche sur le Smic et les 35 heures ( Memento from June 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
9. ↑ Le PS s'enfonce dans la crise après l'élection sur le fil de Martine Aubry ladepeche.fr, November 21, 2008
10. ^ Martine Aubry nouvelle Premier secrétaire du PS après un long psychodrame ladepeche.fr, 25 November 2008
11. ↑ Primaires socialistes: le contre-pied de Ségolène Royal , lemonde.fr, 30 November 2010
12. ↑ L.EQ .: Montebourg votera pour Hollande "à titre exclusivement personnel". liberation.fr, October 14, 2011, accessed October 16, 2011 (French). 
13. ↑ Report on bazonline.ch from June 17, 2012 , accessed on June 17, 2012.
14. ^ David Revault d'Allonnes: François Hollande propose Laurent Fabius à la tête du Conseil constitutionnel. Le Monde (online), February 10, 2016, accessed February 12, 2016 (French). 
15. ↑ Simon Roger, Sophie Landrin, Rémi Barroux: Ségolène Royal reprend "la totalité du dossier climatique". Le Monde (online), February 11, 2016, accessed February 12, 2016 (French). 
16. ↑ http://www.desirsdavenir.org : Ce que j'ai dit sur… La démocratie participative ( Memento of the original from November 18, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Ségolène Royal in a discussion in Rennes, 29 June 2006 
17. ↑ ^{a b c} The positions of Sarkozy and Royal . Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, May 3, 2007
18. ^ Royals violent failures against Sarkozy ( Memento from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) . Neue Zürcher Zeitung, May 4, 2007
19. ↑ ^{a b} Le Figaro: Ségolène Royal prône une “utopie réalisable” et appelle au “rassemblement” ( Memento of the original of November 20, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . August 20, 2006 
20. ^ "Institutions: les propositions des candidats", le monde, March 26, 2007
21. ^ Minister Royal urges Fessenheim to be closed. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , April 6, 2017.

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on June 7, 2007 .