The Flip Medley

A ‘First Spouse’ in France? Not Any Time Soon
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
PARIS, April 26 — No matter who wins the presidency of France on May 6, life in the grand, presidential Élysée Palace is destined to change.

There is no future for the role of dutiful partner filled for the past dozen years by Bernadette Chirac, who as first lady has run charities, held dinners and served as a local official in the farming town of Corrèze.

Both presidential candidates are members of unconventional couples.

Ségolène Royal, the Socialist Party candidate, is not married to the father of her four children, François Hollande. But more than that, they are political rivals. As head of the Socialist Party, he was nearly the candidate himself, and says he will try to run in 2012 if Ms. Royal loses this time.

“Certainly, without doubt,” he said Wednesday in an interview on a train from Paris to Nantes. “It’s also a competition between us.”

He added that even if Ms. Royal won the election, he would not be joining her in Élysée Palace for her five-year term.

“I am not the one who is going to be elected,” he said. “If Ségolène Royal wins, my situation doesn’t change. It is Ségolène Royal who has a great responsibility and has to decide what is the best way of exercising it — including where she lives.”

This is not Bill-and-Hillary in 1992, when Bill Clinton told the American people they would be getting “two for the price of one,” pledging that Mrs. Clinton would be a full-time policy-making partner, and perhaps even a cabinet member, in his presidency.

“In France, you don’t need two, you need one,” Mr. Hollande said. “My role is not to be a co-candidate with Ségolène Royal. The candidate must be free and responsible. My role is to help the candidate — but as party secretary, not my private capacity.”

Cécilia Sarkozy, 49, the wife of the front-runner and conservative candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, has been largely absent from the campaign. Asked how she envisioned her life in 10 years, she replied, “In the United States, jogging in Central Park.”

“I don’t see myself as a first lady,” she said on a popular French television show. “That bores me. I am not politically correct.”

Certainly there have been other instances in the 49-year history of the Fifth Republic in which presidential spouses — and even presidents — did not relish life in Élysée Palace.

Presidents Georges Pompidou, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterrand and their spouses kept their private residences and rarely stayed overnight in Élysée Palace. When the wife of Mr. Giscard d’Estaing, Anne-Aymone, was asked early on what she wanted to do most as first lady, she replied, “To no longer be one.”

But the role is shifting, from a long-suffering pillar of support to a symbol of independence, at a time when the private life of politicians has ever so slightly become part of politics in France.

Mr. Hollande may have already suffered enough. He is the forgotten man of French presidential politics, the one who could have been a contender.

Instead, he has been condemned to a small supporting role: crisscrossing the country to promote Ms. Royal.

He plays the role several ways. He can be loyal and likeable, cool and conflicted, or simply bemused. He has been helped along the way by his natural charm and a sense of humor.

Scanning an article titled “Hollande’s Calvary” in the magazine Le Point, he smiled and said: “If she wins, it’s not a drama. It’s not a comedy, either. It’s a celebration! It’s a success!”

Asked again about his ambitions for 2012, he said: “There will be a competition. It could be Ms. Royal again. It could be others. It could be me.” But he pulled back, adding: “We are not there at the moment. We have to try to win 2007 before thinking about 2012.”

The Royal-Hollande relationship is, to say the least, complicated. The two have been together since they met in the late 1970s as students at the École Nationale d’Administration, the finishing school for France’s political elite. As deputies in Parliament, they have offices linked by a common door.

Even though the two politicians officially share the same home address, they do not seem to coordinate their political messages.

On Monday, the day after Ms. Royal came in second in the first round of the election and qualified for the runoff, Mr. Hollande ruled out any negotiations with François Bayrou, the centrist candidate who came in third.

On the same day, Ms. Royal left a telephone message for Mr. Bayrou proposing a dialogue.

The couple also clashed in January over tax policy, when Mr. Hollande proposed tax increases for workers earning more than $5,200 a month and Mr. Royal rejected the idea.

Those differences help explain why Mr. Hollande says he would be neither Bill Clinton nor Joachim Sauer, the scientist-husband of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Mr. Sauer was nicknamed Phantom of the Opera because for some time, he was only seen at his wife’s side during performances of Wagner.

“I’m the third way!” he joked.

Mr. Hollande might have been the candidate instead of his partner. But the moment Ms. Royal announced that if the party wanted her, she was ready, she became a media star; he receded into the background.

Their relationship is unclear. Repeatedly throughout the campaign, Ms. Royal has called herself a “free woman.” In an interview last year, she said bluntly, “We are not a couple.”

Asked on Wednesday whether they were a couple, Mr. Hollande replied: “It is not for us to either confirm or deny. Our lives belong to us.”

Ms. Royal has denied rumors that she and Mr. Hollande were living apart, saying in a book of her interviews published in March, “Yes, we are still together, and yes, we still live together.”

Unlike Mr. Hollande, Mrs. Sarkozy has largely stayed away from the campaign trail, even though for much of Mr. Sarkozy’s tenure as a cabinet minister, she worked side by side with him, managing his schedule, his strategy, even his diet.

During the first round of balloting, however, Mrs. Sarkozy suddenly reappeared, accompanying her husband to the polling place.

Mr. Sarkozy said in a recent interview with Le Figaro magazine that he intended to live in Élysée Palace if he were elected. Asked whether his wife would play the role of first lady, he skirted the question.

“You elect a candidate, not a family,” he said. “If I am elected, my wife will play a role. That’s obvious. I was reproached for years for exposing my family. Now I am being asked why I don’t expose it.”

In the last two weeks, the French media has gingerly raised the issue of whether Mrs. Sarkozy has left home, as she did in 2005 when she apparently went off with a prominent public relations executive, returning with a flurry of publicity.

“A wife leaving the marriage has far more serious consequences, both physical and psychological, than some extramarital affair,” Daniel Schneidermann, the media columnist for the left-leaning newspaper Libération, wrote last week.

He was referring to the successful concealment for well over a decade of the existence of Mr. Mitterrand’s daughter Mazarine, who was born out of wedlock.

The columnist called on his fellow journalists to break the code of silence and ask the question that “any American colleague would consider natural: ‘Mr. Sarkozy, there are rumors that your wife has left home. What can you tell us about them?’ ”

Asked whether the Sarkozys were no longer living together, Franck Louvrier, Mr. Sarkozy’s spokesman, declined comment, saying in an e-mail message, “That is a private matter.”