Race for the Muddle; Left? Right? Whatever. He (or she) who would be France's next president plays to the messy middle.(presidential elections)(Segolene Royal, Jacques Chirac )

Byline: Michael Meyer and Christopher Dickey (With Tracy McNicoll in Paris)

Will she? could she? What is she? As anyone not living under a stone knows by now, Segolene Royal is the new darling of French politics. With a stratospheric approval rating of 73 percent, she has displaced all comers as the front runner to replace Jacques Chirac in next year's presidential election, and the country is buzzing with speculation: Will her own party, the Socialists, tap her as their candidate? Would she win if they did? But perhaps most telling, amid this frenzy of Segolisme, is that the candidate herself felt compelled to stand and declare herself. "I am a Socialist," she recently assured her adoring public.

It's good she did, for on this point there's room for doubt. Even fellow Socialists brand her a "second Sarkozy," referring to the tough-talking conservative Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who for much of the past year has been his party's most likely champion to succeed Chirac. And to be fair, they are right to be confused. Earlier this month Royal stole a march on her right-wing rival by proposing to scrap a pillar of the modern French welfare state, the 35-hour workweek. "Too flexible," she pronounced it--a threat to the rights and incomes of full-time workers. That came just days after she outflanked Sarkozy on another of his favorite issues, law and order. The way to deal with first-time criminal offenders, she suggested, was discipline within "a military framework" to instill correct principles of honesty, hard work and community service.

Her remarks sent Socialist elders into meltdown. Her own life partner and the father of her four children, Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande, condemned them as near apostasy. As the Socialists struggled to pull together a platform for the coming presidential campaign, to be voted on by the party faithful this week, her ideas were conspicuously absent. Yet here's the rub: according to recent polls, 66 percent of French voters say they approve of them, even if party leaders do not. If Royal continues her rise, the Socialists will be presented with a tough choice: adherence to nearly a century of ideological tradition--this is a party, after all, that still views the world as a struggle between capital and labor and sings the "Internationale" at official gatherings--or winning back the Elysee after 12 years. Beyond that, there's the bigger question of what all this represents. In her drive to the presidency, is Segolene Royal at long last pulling France's old-fashioned Socialist Party into the modern era? Or is she merely duplicating a trend seen elsewhere in Europe--the triumph of the muddled, messy politics of the middle?

In a sense, France is playing catch-up. A decade ago Tony Blair established the dominance of Britain's Labour Party by essentially stealing the Tories' turf. The politics of New Labour is very much the politics of the middle--Thatcherite free markets coupled with moderate European social welfare. Today, Conservative Party leader David Cameron scarcely conceals his intention to retake Downing Street as a virtual Blairite, representing himself as a fresh face to replace a prime minister whom Britons have tired of, even as he continues his predecessor's policies. In Germany, the election of Angela Merkel's still-young coalition government all but marked an end to politics. The new chancellor began her campaign last year calling for a mandate for change. But as soon as she started preaching the tough reforms economists say are needed to get Germany going again, her substantial edge in the polls melted away. Faced with a choice between the conservative Christian Democrats and the opposition Social Democratic Party, Germans voted "both" and "neither." They wanted a single ...