Broadly, she thinks Europe needs more protection against the threatening storms of globalization and that the best way to do this is to return to the unlamented draft EU constitution that was so firmly rejected by Dutch and French voters last year.

In foreign affairs, she maintains that Europe must conduct itself in such a way that it not be "the vassal" of its American ally and that the British must make a final choice between the narrow English Channel and the broad Atlantic Ocean.

If the British and their free-trading allies like the Swedes and Danes do not like this new French direction, then France will plunge ahead with just the Germans, Italians and Spaniards in building a new and closer Europe with harmonized taxes and social security systems, a European army and a single European foreign minister delivering a single European foreign policy.

The problem is that we have all seen this movie before and it ended badly. There is no Europe-wide consensus on a foreign policy that defines itself by not being pro-American. Depending on who wins elections, German and Italian and Spanish governments can be just as pro-American as the British -- like Helmut Kohl, Jose-Maria Aznar and Silvio Berlusconi.

And more protection is a curious call in a globe whose trade rules are now set by the World Trade Organization, with its inbuilt institutional preference for more free trade and more globalization. It is not at all clear precisely how Europeans are to be more protected from the harsh competition of the outside world when Europe is the world's largest single trading block, and when Europe must trade to live -- and to pay for all that imported oil and gas from Russia and the Middle East.

There are lots of good Europeans who shrink from harmonizing taxes, starting with the Irish, who have made a lot of money and attracted lots of new investment by slashing their corporate tax rate to one-third of the European average. The new member states of the European Union in central and eastern Europe are enjoying the booming tax receipts and low tax avoidance that has come with their flat taxes. They have no wish to join the French and Italians and Belgians in their complex and punitive tax regimes that have made inventive accounting so profitable and made Swiss banks, so conveniently placed just across an open border from the grasping taxman, so very rich.

As for the idea of a return to the ill-fated EU constitution, we have not only heard that song booed off the stage before, but we hear yet again the same tired old voices singing it and insisting that the Dutch and French voters made a mistake or knew not what they were doing when they voted 'No'.

Meeting in Florence last Friday, a group of the EU's elder statesmen met to issue a joint declaration that urges member states to "get back on the path to reform of the European institutions." Led by Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the former French president who chaired the committee that drafted the ill-fated constitution, they included the former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and the former presidents of Italy and Portugal. They called for a "political leap by all the parties concerned so that the new process is concluded at the time of the new European parliament in spring 2009."

In detail, they want to keep almost all the 270-page document, including the entire first and second parts of the Constitution, and are prepared to rewrite some of the third section on the working of EU institutions so that it would be "clarified."

"The 2005 no vote was a hiccup," Giscard told Le Monde, in the authentic voice of the superior Eurocrat who knows better than the humble voters what is good for them. "Now, the economic and social climate has changed."

Segolene Royal and her top aides seem to agree. Her spokesman and chief foreign policy aide Gilles Savary, who is also a member of the European Parliament, says that the essence of the draft constitution can be contained in an ambitious new EU Treaty. And if what he calls the "ultra-Atlanticist" block led by Britain shrink from it, then the rest of Europe should go ahead regardless.

"Great Britain is absolutely indispensable to the European Union. It is great nation, a global power. But the question the English have to answer is -- do the English consider the English Channel to be wider than the Atlantic? We on the continent have the right to deplore the fact that Great Britain appears to consider the Channel is wider," Savary told the Daily Telegraph in an interview this week. "The question that needs to be asked is -- do we want to be vassals of the United States, do we want to be a 51st state?" Savary added. "We cannot have a Europe where one part goes to war in Iraq, another part does not, and we all end up paying the bill."

There is no guarantee that Segolene Royal will win, and if she does, the ambitious spending plans of her party's program look highly unrealistic. The Socialists plan to increase the current government's public spending by 32 percent over the next five years, an extra $60 billion a year that is mostly supposed to come from economic growth, assumed to be 2.5 percent a year. In the last quarter, French growth was zero.

Segolene Royal's rivals in next year's elections have yet to be decided, but her main opponent from the center-right seems likely to be the tough Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy. But already it seems that the left vote will be split between Royal and candidates from the Communist Party, from the Greens and from the far-left Trotskyists. If they take too many votes from her, then once again Jean-Marie Le Pen of the far-right Front National could nose ahead her in the first round of voting, just as the divided votes of the Left allowed him to beat the incumbent Socialist premier Lionel Jospin last time.

This looks unlikely. Segolene Royal is, at least for the moment, too popular and with too wide an appeal. But her triumphant drive to win the Socialist Party's nomination faltered in the public TV debates when she displayed an uncertain grasp of world affairs and a tendency to adopt controversial new policies on the spur of the moment. She will be sorely tested in a tough Presidential campaign, and looking at her policies, a lot of her European partners (not to mention many Americans) will be hoping that she fails.

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