When the members of the French socialist Party held their summer seminar in the pretty coast town of La Rochelle last month, they discussed the sort of topics that only a true policy wonk could love. Does there need to be "a new equilibrium between labor and capital"? Is Latin America "the new horizon of socialism"?

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) Behind the high-toned banter, however, lay a visceral political yearning.

France's left has not held the nation's presidency since 1995, and it is hungry for power. It might be thought odd, then, that the person who has the strongest chance of winning the top office in next May's presidential election didn't take part in any of the earnest, furrowed-brow debates. Sure, Ségolène Royal was there at the beginning of the proceedings (she's the President of Poitou-Charentes, La Rochelle's region) and she was there at the end, smiling at the jokes in the closing speech of François Hollande, the party secretary — and, to complicate matters, her partner (they are not married) and the father of her four children.

But while her colleagues were laying out their views on everything from the minimum wage to how to give the European Union more heft, Royal, who turns 53 this month, was seen on a ferry boat, on a live TV interview and at a posh portside restaurant. "As the leader of the race, it's not her job to bat around ideas with the challengers," explained Malek Boutih, a member of the party's National Secretariat. "She has to concentrate her power for the battle ahead against the right."

Many are keen to remind her that it isn't yet her battle to lead. Party members will not choose their standard bearer until November. But opinion polls suggest Royal is by far the most popular of the left's possible candidates, and the only one who could beat Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, leader and all-but-anointed candidate of the main party of the right, the Union for a Popular Movement. Deliberately, Royal is avoiding a direct battle with her party rivals, an indication, her campaign advisers insist, of her determination to create a new political dynamic in a France aching for change, one that depends on a direct connection to the voter. She has spurned ideological litmus tests in favor of a politics that helps people "construct their lives and the happiness of their loved ones," as she said recently to a massive crowd in Burgundy. That, say her aides, is evidence of the thing that most clearly sets Royal apart. She's a woman.

In the view of Royal's supporters, her worst enemies and the lady herself, femininity is key to her success. Royal readily acknowledges that her policies would have less of a pull if they weren't being laid out by a woman. "It's a symbol of change," she says. "Where men have failed, people think, O.K., maybe we'll try a woman." Her position has only been strengthened by the disdain she's drawn from rivals like former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, who archly asked last year, "Who will take care of the children?" She doesn't duck the obvious fact that, in a nation whose politics is run by men in suits, she is different. "Why," she asked in a recent interview with Time, "should one have to be sad, ugly and boring to go into politics these days?"

Why indeed? But the true surprise, perhaps, is that France has seen nothing quite like Royal before. She seeks to lead a nation that makes a big deal of honoring and supporting its women. In no European country outside Scandinavia do women make up as large a proportion of the workforce as in France — thanks in part to a generous system of maternity support, which has also given France Europe's second highest fertility rate, behind only Ireland.

Women run France's Defense Ministry, one of its most prestigious math programs, the world's biggest builder of nuclear power plants, the national theater and the employers' federation (see Leading Ladies). With all that — plus an abiding conceit that it epitomizes the avant-garde — France should have been among the first countries to see a woman in its highest political office. Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of Britain in 1979, Gro Harlem Brundtland served three terms in Norway from 1981. Germany's glass ceiling was smashed last year with the election of Angela Merkel. India has had a woman leader, as have Bangladesh, New Zealand, Israel and Chile — why not France?

Because in gender as in so much else, French politicians talk a better game than they play. To be sure, in May 1991 President François Mitterrand appointed France's first and only female Prime Minister, Edith Cresson — but she was tossed aside in less than a year. Jacques Chirac's party was led for three years by Michèle Alliot-Marie, now the Defense Minister, who is as formidable a politician as Royal and would be a potential presidential candidate herself if Sarkozy didn't have his party's nomination sewn up. But on the whole, the French political parties remain clannish clusters of ideological currents owing fealty to male leaders. "All the polls show French society to be very open to the idea of a woman President," says Françoise Gaspard, a feminist sociologist and former Socialist Deputy. "But the political parties are still very archaic, controlled by men who can't stand the idea. The fact that Ségolène is no longer acting as a 'comrade' but as a rival is completely astonishing for them, and completely insufferable."

There's a history to this. French women weren't granted the right to vote or stand in national elections until 1944, a generation after women in the U.S. and most of the rest of Europe. Since 2000, all political parties have had to present as many female as male candidates on their electoral lists. Yet only 12% of the current members of the National Assembly are women, compared with 20% in Britain's House of Commons and 45% in Sweden's Parliament. (With women making up just 15% of the House of Representatives, the U.S. has only a slightly better record than France.)

With traditional politics hidebound, Royal has tended to bypass party fixtures and go straight to the people. "Her strategy, which she exercises with no scruples, is one of seduction, and that's a new thing in French politics," says Régine Lemoine-Darthois, co-author of a recent book about women of Royal's generation titled An Age Called Desire. "She holds up a mirror to French women that they find very agreeable: to knock men dead while being a woman of power. She's proof that you don't have to abandon your femininity to make it." No kidding. At a meeting in Paris earlier this year, a man told Royal she looked good. "You're not too bad yourself," she retorted. Her arsenal includes the occasional girlish giggle, a disarming smile and a sartorial penchant for pure white.

To her opponents in the party, those are unfair tactics, ones that mask an ideological emptiness that will show up sooner or later. "Technique doesn't replace politics; there have to be ideas, convictions, a discussion of the stakes," said Lionel Jospin, who, you might have thought, would have had the decency to stay silent: Jospin was so disastrous a Socialist presidential candidate in 2002 that he was beaten in the first round of voting not just by Chirac but by the far-right demagogue Jean-Marie le Pen.

An adviser to another Socialist challenger, former Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn, strikes a similar note. "What the polls measure is popularity, not competence," he says. "Socialists have a furious love of debate, and she's not debating. What does she think about debt, about foreign policy, about economic governance? You've got to talk about this stuff. And you can't talk to party activists like you do to public opinion."

Oh no? Royal thinks she can. She promises a bottom-up approach to an electorate disenchanted with France's élitist and sclerotic political culture. She stays away from the abstract nouns beloved of French intellectuals, and makes a very public point of listening instead to voters' concerns, often sent to her heavily-frequented website called, in sturdily nonideological fashion, Desires for the Future. Cavalierly breaching party doctrine, she advocates a tougher line on delinquents, wants to loosen widely circumvented rules requiring students to attend schools in their neighborhoods, and has even criticized the 35-hour workweek. "She is popular because she's a woman who has a nondoctrinaire stance toward politics," says Stéphane Rozès, director of the polling firm CSA-Opinions. "People see her as out to solve problems, while so many others, most of them men, are stuck in the fog of ideology."

That's a sense that has taken hold not just in the wider public, but among activists. Socialist Party membership rolls have almost doubled since the beginning of the year, and more of the newcomers are female, better educated and younger than the average. As a crowd filed into a desperately hot market hall in Rennes to hear Royal speak one evening this summer, Jean-Pierre Planckaert was at the back of the hall taking in new party applications. Party membership in the region had almost trebled since the beginning of the year, he said, "and the new members are 15 years younger on average than the old ones."

That isn't politics; that's evidence of fandom. "What's interesting about Ségolène to many of us is that she's a modern woman who has kept a lot of traditional attributes," says Eliane Obis, a teacher and deputy mayor in the Toulouse suburb of Montrabe. "She's not a woman who seems to be a man." Catherine Le Guen, a marketing executive from Bordeaux who just joined the Socialist Party, says she is drawn to the way Royal "doesn't pontificate, but touches sensitivities. And she doesn't epitomize careerism, like other candidates."

Well: yes and no. In truth, Royal's career has always been politics. Born in Dakar, Senegal, the daughter of a French army officer, she grew up as the fourth of eight children in a large house in Lorraine, not far from that of her paternal grandfather, an army general. Her father's regime was a strict one (the family had to sing Gregorian chants on Sundays). Royal was sent to a Catholic boarding school and the University of Nancy before attaining the classical educational polish of the French political élite: a degree from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris ("Sciences Po") and another from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ena), where her class included the current Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, and her partner, Hollande. They met there in 1978 and had their first child in 1984.

After ena, Royal joined Mitterrand's staff, and in 1988 he encouraged her to campaign for the National Assembly from a southwestern rural district. She held on to the seat in three elections, and in 2004 beat the conservative incumbent to become President of Poitou-Charentes — the only woman to lead one of France's 26 regions. She has also been a central government Minister — first with responsibility for the environment (pregnant with her fourth child, she led the French delegation to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992) and then for schools, where she pushed to give parents a stronger role in an education system that ignored them, passed new laws to deal with bullying and pedophilia, and made the morning-after pill available in high schools. As France's first Minister of the Family from 2000 to 2002, she was responsible for laws introducing paternity leave and recognizing the right of divorced fathers to play a larger role in child rearing.

The environment and family matters have not been the traditional paths to the presidency; the French political élite takes finance and foreign affairs more seriously. But that doesn't seem to have hurt Royal. A poll last week showed that French voters had more confidence in her economic policy than any other candidate's — despite her having barely articulated one. Nor does it hurt that the camera loves her. This summer a paparazzo caught her on the beach in a blue bikini, and another spotted her in an inflatable boat with one of her daughters and Hollande, who was reading A History of France for Dummies.

Royal's candidacy has caused a wrenching conflict of interest for Hollande — a man, it has long been assumed, with presidential ambitions himself, and who, as party secretary, has to ensure that the selection of a candidate is not so divisive that it helps the conservatives. He has carefully reserved the right to throw his own hat into the ring if he thinks that's the best route to party unity. But it is hard to envisage what would have to happen between now and Oct. 3, when candidates must be registered, to force him to oppose his partner.

Still, Royal is nowhere near the Elysée yet. "The right is more or less in marching order," she told Time. "Now everyone should get behind me instead of trying to destroy me." Her supporters leave little doubt as to what their attitude would be if party dinosaurs connived to derail her. That, says Delphine Batho, a member of the party secretariat and a Ségolène supporter, would be "just one more time that a woman has been blocked because men don't want her to succeed." Royal herself, say her aides, is ready for the challenge."They're all waiting for her to crack up and start sobbing," says one. "There's nothing worse for these guys than a woman who's not fragile. And she's not, believe me." Not sad, not ugly, not boring — and as France's gray male politicos may soon find out — not weak, either.

• JAMES GRAFF | La Rochelle
• Can Ségolène Royal's feminine campaigning style get her elected to France's top job?