Royal's home turf- a snapshot of future France?

Angouleme (France), Feb 6: For the past three years, Segolene Royal has ruled over a picturesque French region best known for its goat's cheese, Cognac and beautiful coastline.

Now the Socialist leader is bidding to extend her reign across France as the country's first woman president, and she hopes to take many of her regional inventions with her.

Royal, 53, running in a tight race against conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, has said she wants to make France fairer, greener and more transparent, but has refused thus far to outline concrete proposals on many issues.

To gauge what might follow the campaign rhetoric, analysts point to her policies in western Poitou-Charentes, a region based midway along France's Atlantic Coast.

Promising a ''more efficient society'', Royal has made regional aid subject to firms promising not to lay off workers, has subsidised energy-saving initiatives and introduced a touch of grassroots democracy at schools.

She has also encouraged people to ''eat chicken twice a week'' to support local agriculture.

Colleagues and rivals say Royal has made her mark in a relatively short amount of time, but they disagree over how effective she has been and some suggest that behind her ever-present smile lies an authoritarian commander.

''She's a very strong woman. But I wonder whether she likes people. Conviviality is not her thing,'' said Henri de Richemont, the leader of the region's conservative opposition.

Any One for Pool?

Given her strict leadership style, it is perhaps ironic that her proposals to boost democracy have dominated the headlines in Poitou-Charentes and beyond.

One such ''direct democracy'' initiative allows students, parents and teachers to decide in debates how to use some 10 million euros (13 million dollars) of the region's education budget.

In Paris, Royal's ideas to strengthen democracy have stirred unease and her proposal to have lawmakers held accountable to citizen juries were derided as populist by friend and foe alike.

But students in her region welcome the school project.

''These meetings give us new responsibility,'' said 17-year old student Antony Bianucci, after successfully defending his idea -- to buy new computers -- against calls for a pool table.

''I feel I can change things, even if they're small.'' Despite a turnout of just six of the 1,500 students at the school in Angouleme, parent Marie Christine Perroy praised the project as an example of what Royal stood for.

''It's democracy in practice. That's Royal's style. I'm confident she can continue in this sense on a national level.''

Royal was born in Senegal and has no family ties to Poitou-Charentes, but the rural region has nonetheless played a pivotal role in her career. Her political idol, former Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, was born in the area. It was he who helped find her a parliamentary seat in the region and it was here she shot to national fame in 2004 when elected president of the regional council, winning on the home turf of Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the conservative prime minister at the time.

The region has an annual budget of some 630 million euros for education, infrastructure and economic projects, and Royal shuttles between Paris, where her partner and four children live, and west France, where she runs the region with firmness.

''The talk about a participatory budget ... is contradictory for someone who has a tendency to decide on her own,'' said Communist Simone Fayaud, one of Royal's allies on the council.

Trees and Slippers

Royal's regional vice-president and fellow Socialist Jean-Francois Fountaine said the region had become more open thanks to her, although he conceded she had sometimes failed to consult locally when she first arrived in office.

''It wasn't easy at the start but it's better now,'' he said.

Raffarin has criticised Royal for not introducing large-scale projects despite raising taxes, but Fountaine said she had boosted regional help for young entrepreneurs, with grants that helped create some 3,000 firms and 5,000 jobs.

Royal has also made some regional aid subject to firms promising to act in an environmentally sound fashion, not to lay off employees and not to move production abroad.

Laurent Guyon, who runs a company producing wood structures to build homes, said he had had no difficulty signing the commitment: the regional grant had helped him hire an extra 20 people for his business north of Angouleme.

''I think it's a good measure of give and take,'' he said.

''The region wants to get something back. It's an intelligent way of handling aid.'' Environmentalists in the region have praised her commitment to reducing emissions, as well as a project to plant hundreds of thousands of trees and grants to boost ecological investment.

But both on national and regional level, her critics say the youthful Royal is drawn to image-grabbing initiatives.

Royal raised eyebrows in her region when she distributed thousands of slippers to boarding schools to help an ailing slipper factory -- a plan not well-received by all students.

''Luckily they didn't come in my size,'' the tall student Bianucci in Angouleme said.

''What a media coup. The last thing we need are slippers.''

Reuters