by Jessica Reed
Everyone was impatiently waiting for it - so much that jokes were beginning to fly whenever Ségolène Royal's name was mentionned: "Oh, you mean the woman with no program?".
Yesterday she proved them wrong.
She presented 100 propositions (Libération - in french) forming a "presidential pact" with a huge emphasis on any and everything social - while never mentionning her main opponent a single time in two hours. This time her detractors will not be able to blame her lack of ambitions: her ideas, which she claims are directly inspired from her online participative debate at Désirs D'avenir, are ambitious but certainly not abstract.
Her reforms are focusing on very concrete, easy-to-grasp themes: education, housing, purchase power and environment amongst others. She promises to raise the minimum wage and pensions, to assure free health care for people under 16, mandatory schooling for children aged 3, "citizens juries" in collectivities, more educators and counselors in schools and substaintially more funding for research to counter-attack the European brain drain phenomenon.
In short, her program is very much socialist and might appeal to those fearing that the French left had lost its passion and core values. On the other side of the Atlantic her program is seen as "far-left politics" (Herald tribune), which can only make a French citizen smile : the real "far-left" presidential candidate is José Bové, a true anti-globalisation activist who can usually be found destroying MacDonald's restaurants or doing time for having sabotaged genetically modified corn fields.
