POLITICS-EUROPE: Where Women Don’t Run

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Oct 5 2005 (IPS) - Ségolene Royal did not seem surprised that her decision to run for president early 2007 drew some sniggers.

Royal (52), a leading member of the Socialist Party (PS), has credentials enough.. She has university degrees in economics and political science, and has been a high-ranking official in French administration for more than 20 years.

Since 2004, she has been president of the Poitou-Charentes region in the southwest of the country. That position is equivalent roughly to head of government in a federal state.

But PS leaders began to dismiss her candidature within hours of the announcement.

“If she runs, who is going to take care of (her) children,” said Laurent Fabius, also campaigning to be party candidate for the 2007 election. Royal is mother of four children.

“The presidential campaign is not a beauty contest,” said Jack Lang, another Socialist self-appointed presidential candidate. Henri Emmanuelli, who claims to be the leader of the PS left wing, remarked, “Next time I go for hunting, I will add one more bullet to my fusil.”

While Socialist politicians were offering their views, opinion surveys suggested that a substantial minority of French voters would approve Royal’s candidature. A poll gave her 23 percent of the vote – a better score than Laurent Fabius got in the survey..

“It is reassuring to see that people are more prepared to consider a woman running for president than the political parties apparatuses,” Royal said.

France has had a non-elected female prime minister; Edith Cresson’s short-lived government was appointed in the early 1990s by then president Francois Mitterrand.

“But it is unlikely that political parties, which are dominated by men and misogyny, will field a woman as presidential candidate,” wrote Eric Fotorino, a journalist with Le Monde. Only 12 percent of members of the National Assembly are women.

“Ségolene has one chance in 10,000 to be nominated party candidate for 2007,” a PS official told IPS.

Royal is not the only woman eyeing the presidential post. Defence minister Michelle Alliot-Marie told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that she would “have an important role to play in the selection of the UMP candidate (the Union for a Popular Movement is the ruling party).” The statement was interpreted as Alliot-Marie’s claim to be considered a pre-candidate.

The debate in France arose after Angela Merkel’s unsuccessful attempt so far to become the first woman to be elected head of government in Germany.

Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), won the Sep. 18 general election by a small margin but failed to obtain a majority in the parliament, the Bundestag.

German feminist leader Alice Schwarzer said the decision by Merkel’s party to avoid women’s issues could have lost her female votes. “If a woman stands up to defend women’s rights, she will be immediately discredited as ‘knee-jerk feminist’.”

Schwarzer, founding-publisher of the feminist monthly Emma, added, “In German politics women’s issues have been pushed back to the bottom of the agenda. If German politicians talk at all about women, they do it only by referring to us as mothers.”

Germans have never elected a woman for a leading political office, let alone Chancellor, other than Heidi Simonis who was prime minister in the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein between 1993 and 2005.

Simonis only got to that position because her predecessor Bjorn Engholm resigned in May 1993. Later she won two consecutive mandates as head of the local government.

No woman has ever been elected to the highest public office in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands.

It is a different scene up north. Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister of Britain, Mary Robinson President of Ireland. Gro Harlem Brundtland was prime minister of Norway between February and October 1981. Tarja Halonen is president of Finland.