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152 | THE PROFESSIONALISM OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

its own limits in 2002. That year, the presidential race led to a surprise as great as the
unexpected difficulties of re-election met by De Gaulle in 1965.The first round of voting
eliminated the incumbent Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, competing again,
though he was thought to possess all the necessary skills and weapons to push
incumbent opponent President Jacques Chirac into early retirement. What came as a
shock was not only that Lionel Jospin could not make it to the second round of voting,
but that in failing to do so he gave way to the far-right extremist leader, Jean-Marie Le
Pen.

Lionel Jospin had put up a very sophisticated and professionalised campaign, even
taking the time to think twice about the nickname of his campaign headquarters:
instead of calling it the ‘Headquarters’, or any similar banal name, he had it baptised
‘L’atelier de campagne’ (The campaign workshop), a subtle effort to try and distance
himself from the professional political marketing techniques he was paradoxically
obeying in doing so.

More importantly, as soon as his campaign started, in his first interview during one of
the main evening television newscasts, Jospin exposed an extremely bold target, which
most probably put off more than one of his potential supporters on voting day. He
made an unexpected statement:‘Le projet que je propose au pays n’est pas un projet
socialiste’ (‘The project I am advocating for the country is not a socialist one’). In the
following days of his campaign, he consequently outlined campaign issues that were
quite far from what was expected of a socialist candidate: for instance, he insisted on
the question of the personal security of the citizen, in the streets, in their home, or for
their children at school, thus choosing to expose himself by trying to take his
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adversaries’field,but proving ill at ease with that choice .
The Professionalisation of Political Communication
It seems that this targeting strategy had been mainly conceived by his main political
campaigning advisor, the ever present Jacques Séguéla, with the help of his younger
protégé, Stéphane Fouks, a new star in the political marketing business and at the helm
of one of Séguéla’s company subsidiaries, Euro-RSCG Public. They were thinking that
Jospin, like Mitterrand in 1981, could only win the race if he could attract citizens
inclined to vote for the centre or even for the right. This choice proved wrong: the
targeted new social category of Bourgeois Bohêmes (Bohemian Bourgeois), now
inhabiting the main towns, and notably the French capital (leading to the arrival of a
socialist mayor at its helm for the first time), was clearly not in a majority in France. Also,
this targeting might have fared better for the second round of the race, but was not
suitable for an initial round, when citizens mainly cast their vote for the politician they
most favour, before deciding in the second round which one is less distant from them,
so to speak.

A confirmation of this mistake came two years later, with the local government and
European parliamentary election results, which saw the Socialist Party regain its usual
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