Royal, Ségolène

▪ French politician

born Sept. 22, 1953, Dakar, Seneg.

 

 French politician, who was the Socialist Party's candidate for president of France in 2007.

      Royal, the daughter of a French colonel, was born on an army base in Senegal. She studied economics at the École Nationale d'Administration in Paris, where she met her longtime companion, François Hollande, who later headed the Socialist Party; Royal joined the party in the late 1970s. After graduating in 1980, she served as an adviser to French Pres. Franƈois Mitterrand (Mitterrand, François). In 1988 she was elected to the National Assembly. She later held a series of government posts, including minister of the environment (1992–93) and deputy minister of education (1997–2000), before becoming president of the Poitou-Charentes regional council in 2004.

      Two years later Royal was named the Socialist Party's presidential candidate, seeking to become the first woman to serve as president of France. At times difficult to pin down ideologically, she adopted a tough stance on law and order and pledged to raise the minimum wage. In addition, she hinted at increasing the country's 35-hour workweek. In the first round of voting on April 22, 2007, Royal finished second, winning nearly 26 percent of the vote. In the runoff election on May 6, Royal was defeated by Nicolas Sarkozy (Sarkozy, Nicolas) of the centre-right Union for a Popular Movement party. In the fall of 2008 Royal vied with Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille, to replace Hollande (from whom Royal was now estranged) as head of the Socialist Party; she won the first round of voting but narrowly lost to Aubry in the runoff.

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