Defeated Royal kicks out her partner - and party leader
Split . . . Segolene Royal and Francois Hollande.
SEGOLENE Royal, the defeated Socialist candidate for the presidency, came clean with France yesterday.
She admitted that her partnership with party leader Francois Hollande had been in trouble throughout the long electoral campaign.
Ms Royal made it clear that she had asked Mr Hollande to leave because he had a "love story" elsewhere.
"Like all couples, we have had difficulties. I decided to put them aside during the presidential and then parliamentary election campaigns," Ms Royal (53) said on France Inter radio.
"I have suggested to Francois that he should live apart and he accepted."
It was time to clear the air before her own bid for leadership of the Socialist party, she added.
Mr Hollande (52), speaking on another radio station within 30 minutes of Ms Royal, said: "I have always sought to separate politics . . . from private life, which must be protected."
Neither Ms Royal nor the media identified the other woman with whom her partner of 28 years and father of their four children is claimed to be involved. Privacy laws and media tradition in France discourage curiosity about such matters.
Ms Royal referred in a Sunday-night statement to books that have reported obliquely on Mr Hollande's friendship early in the campaign with a political journalist for 'Paris Match' magazine.
"I have asked Francois Hollande to leave our home, to pursue his love interest, which is now laid out in books and newspapers, and I wish him happiness," Ms Royal said.
That sentence marked the first time that France had heard of the separation of the star left-wing couple. Viewers and politicians were surprised by the 'Anglo-Saxon-style' intrusion of conjugal drama into election news.
The story was relayed by a news agency before the publication tomorrow of 'Les Coulisses d'une defaite' (Behind the Scenes of Defeat), a book by Christine Courcol and Thierry Masure in which Ms Royal reveals the split.
Throughout her presidential run, which began in late 2005, it was clear that Ms Royal and Mr Hollande, who are bound by a civil union, were in difficulty. But in March, a month before the election, Ms Royal dismissed as nonsense tales of their rumoured separation. (© The Times, London)
- Charles Bremner
