PARIS, June 8 (UPI) -- One of the last great bastions of the left is crumbling. The French Socialist Party, whose origins go back to the days of Karl Marx himself, seems poised to follow the American Democrats and Britain's Labour Party into that squishy political center where ideologies are barred and the winning is all.
And yet the French Socialist Party has seldom been in better shape. New members are flooding to join, over 80,000 paying their 20 euros ($24) for their membership cards in the past three months. On the radio talk-shows, callers introduce themselves with the words "Speaking as a new member of the Socialist Party..."
France's Socialists have suddenly become fashionable. There are several factors that help explain this, among them the stubbornly high unemployment and sluggish economy, the high levels of crime, street violence and insecurity, and above all the virtual collapse of the center-right government.
The French government is nominally led by the hapless Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, whose approval ratings languish below 30 percent after his battering by riots and massed demonstrations that defeated his economic reform plans. In fact the government is still dominated by the old man, the lame-duck President Jacques Chirac whose 12 years of supreme power ends next year.
This prospect of next year's election giving France a new start also helps to explain the flood of new interest in the Socialists, or rather in their new star, Segolene Royal, the stylish and elegant single mother who has over the past year taken French politics by storm. The new members flooding into the party -- over 40 percent of them women and over 48 percent public employees -- overwhelmingly say they are joining because they have been inspired by "Sego."
And yet Sego herself hardly sounds Socialist at all. Her political appeal seems based largely on her readiness to overthrow the traditional faiths and shibboleths of her party. In recent days, she has suggested that young delinquents should be sent into the army to learn discipline, and also questioned the 35-hour week, the proud achievement of the last Socialist government of Lionel Jospin. His irritated response was to complain of her on TV that "Socialism is not her first language."
More striking still, her likely opponent in next year's Presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy, Minister of the Interior and by far the most popular of the conservative politicians, said of Segolene that "she would be a very good candidate for the Right."
"Welcome to our club," Sarkozy told her after Royal's call for young thugs to be given a taste of military discipline. "All the more welcome now that you have come across our ideas."
Segolene Royal, who has for years lived with and borne children by the party's current leader, secretary-general Francois Hollande, is following a well-worn path in politics. Bill Clinton in the United States and Tony Blair in Britain led their respective political parties into the center of politics. They too adopted ideas and policies from their opponents, announced that the old leftist ways of labor unions and class warfare were over, and also inspired a short-lived flood of enthusiasm and new membership.
But Clinton and Blair achieved this when they had already taken the helm of their respective parties. Royal is doing so while still just the head of a regional council with no national standing except for a dominant position in the opinion polls, and battling hard against the Socialist Party's old guard.
This week, France's Socialists gathered in Congress to hammer out a common policy document for next year's Presidential elections. Royal's ideas, of ditching the 35-hour week and bringing in the army to help tackle youth delinquency, were notably absent from the final document. And it did contain some very old guard ideas, like re-nationalizing the privatized giant utility Electricite de France, spending much more on make-work jobs for the young unemployed and more than doubling the minimum wage by 2012.
But this common policy program is unlikely to overwhelm the verdict of the opinion polls, which give Royal a 73 percent approval rating and show 66 percent of French voters approving her ideas on using the army and scrapping the 35-hour week. Other polls show her to be the only Socialist or center-left candidates with a serious chance of winning next year's election. Most old Socialists want to win power and the flood of new party members, each with a vote for the party's Presidential nominee, want Royal, so it will be a real surprise if she does not emerge as the standard-bearer.
But it will represent a real change in the nature of European politics. The French Socialists, like the French Communist Party, have stuck far longer than most to their old faiths and traditions. They still sing the "Internationale" and "The Red Flag" with heart and feeling, still speak with pride of their role as "the vanguard of the working class" and still see the world as an endless struggle between capital and labor.
And now they seem poised to follow Clinton and Blair into the new politics of the media and the opinion poll, the post-modern politics where ideologies matter less than personal ambition and the fruits of power and public office.
"France, like other countries, is learning what it means to live in a media-defined world, in a democracy of public opinion, in which the political reality created by polls and media commentators and political marketing becomes a political force in itself," says Dr. Pascal Perrineau, director of political research at the prestigious Sciences Po institute in Paris.
"This mediatised democracy is not always in synch with the democracy of political parties and their members and militants, and (with the Royal campaign) we are about to get a textbook example of the power of the medatised reality to influence the party machines."
