Word: royal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...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...
Japan is divided into opposing camps of royal watchers: Team Kiko and Team Masako. It is an unusual development. The imperial family, the oldest royal line in the world, is also the most tightly controlled. Its members aren't allowed to have last names, personal wealth, opinions or, for the most part, lives. But the behind-the-scenes tug-of-war over the future of the dynasty has made the royals unexpectedly human--and made Masako and Kiko living symbols of the intense pressure on Japanese women to be both modern and traditional...
...year after year passed without a royal pregnancy, hopes that Masako would become the modern face of the imperial family gradually died. It was clear that she had failed in her one traditional duty: to produce a male heir. All her education and accomplishments meant nothing by comparison. Japanese tabloids cast aspersions on her patriotism and her toughness, and not long after she gave birth to a daughter, Aiko, in December 2001, Masako sank into a depression. Now she has gone from an icon of style to an object of pity. "She's been crushed," says housewife Hiroko Nishiyama...