Presidental candidates in France need to reach out beyond their own party. So it is no great surprise that Ségolène Royal, the socialist frontrunnner for next year's presidential election, should have decided to take a swing at the introduction of the 35-hour working week, her party's flagship measure when it was last in government. But it is startling that she should have attacked it not from the centre, where Ms Royal had seemed to position much of the rest of her campaign, but from the left.

In a policy statement posted on her website yesterday when half the country was on holiday, Ms Royal criticises the 35-hour measure, not for the failed make-work scheme that it is, but for the manner in which employers have used it to press workers to be more flexible in other ways, such as agreeing to annualise their hours. For the Financial Times, this ancillary flexibility was a side-effect of a law that was otherwise erroneously based on the "lump of labour" fallacy - the idea of there being only a given amount of available work that needed cutting into smaller slices to provide the unemployed with jobs. But Ms Royal claims that, quite apart from the issue of job creation, the law has made it far harder for the low-skilled to make ends meet. Textile workers, for example, have been able to reduce their working week by only one and a half, not the planned four, hours from the previous 39-hour norm. Subsequent centre-right governments have tinkered with the law, but only to give it a bit more of the flexibility of which Ms Royal disapproves.