Military training for unruly French teenagers. Boot camp for their parents. A heavy hand and zero tolerance. The latest rhetoric from the far right? No, these ideas are coming from the top Socialist contender for next year's presidential race, Segolene Royal.
Her hard-line response to renewed violence in troubled suburbs this week sounds strangely similar to that of her chief rival on the right, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. The battle is on between the two dynamic figures, and Royal's latest salvo attests that security will loom large in the election campaign.
It caught Sarkozy off guard - but also worried many of Royal's fellow leftists, uneasy about her soaring popularity and her departures from the Socialist Partyline. The party has yet to choose its candidate for 2007, and many are jockeying for the spot.
"We need a return to the heavy hand," Royal said Wednesday night on a visit to Bondy, a suburb east of Paris hit by rioting that swept impoverished French neighborhoods for weeks last fall.
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