France now has a clear choice. Does the country want a mummy or a daddy as its next president?

Ségolène Royal, the Socialist party candidate, is running as Mummy. She begins her official television broadcast with the words: “I am a woman, a mother of four children. I have my feet on the ground.” Nicolas Sarkozy, the centre-right candidate, is running as a strict father figure. Mr Sarkozy accuses Ms Royal of wanting to “mollycoddle” the nation. The first four sentences of his campaign broadcast begin with the word “work”.

Ms Royal’s message is maternal and reassuring. Yes, France needs to change, “but the country can be reformed without brutalisation”. She has no intention of reversing the 35-hour limit on working hours that Mr Sarkozy attacks as a job-destroying abomination. In fact, the “reforms” the Socialist party proposes would make France’s welfare state even more elaborate and costly. Although she is the candidate of the left, Ms Royal is the real conservative in this election. She believes that the French system is something to be proud of and must be defended. Her main economic argument is that the country is suffering from a lack of demand. She wants to boost the minimum wage by almost 20 per cent to increase “purchasing power”.

Mr Sarkozy has a much tougher message. He is the candidate of “rupture”. He believes that the French system needs profound change – above all to encourage work. This will mean loosening rigid labour laws, cutting taxes and shrinking the size of the state. It will also mean confronting powerful interest groups, such as the public-sector unions.

The Mummy-Daddy divide extends to social policy and the style of the two campaigns. Ms Royal first marked herself out as a new sort of socialist by talking about issues that matter to families, but seem absurdly lowbrow to traditional leftwing Parisian intellectuals. Should girls be allowed to wear G-strings to school? Is there too much violence on television? She has always emphasised that she is a candidate who listens, and set up a website to elicit policy ideas from ordinary voters.

Mr Sarkozy has a much more traditional and macho style of leadership. He has played the tough guy – famously referring to criminals in the French suburbs as “scum”. He accused the Socialists of “making excuses for hooligans” who rioted recently at a Paris station.

Mr Sarkozy’s supporters imply that Mummy is a bit weak and does not really know what she is talking about. Ms Royal’s supporters suggest that Daddy is a bit scary and too ready to reach for his belt.

By visiting the grave of General de Gaulle last week, Mr Sarkozy tacitly raised the question of whether France is ready for a woman in de Gaulle’s chair. His supporters were gleeful early in the campaign, when Ms Royal made a series of ignorant statements on foreign policy. The resignation of an important Royal adviser, who publicly accused the candidate of being “heavily incompetent”, was also unhelpful to the Socialist cause.

But Mr Sarkozy is also vulnerable. Some in the Socialist party believe that with Ms Royal trailing Mr Sarkozy by more than five points after the first round of voting, her best chance of winning is to turn the election next month into a referendum on her opponent’s character. On the Royal website, there are suggestions that a Sarkozy presidency will be a threat to democracy. Ms Royal said this month that the right’s programme “conceals brutality, violence and civil war”.

Both candidates know that they must defuse these dangerous slurs before the final round of voting on May 6. It can be assumed that Ms Royal will pick up most of the votes of the 11 per cent or so who voted for the extreme left in the first round, while Mr Sarkozy will get most of the 11 per cent who voted for the far right. So the last two weeks of the campaign will see a scramble for the middle ground, as both candidates seek to woo the 18.5 per cent of voters who opted for François Bayrou, a centrist, in the first round of voting. Ms Royal will need to convince voters that she can be a tough leader. Mr Sarkozy will want to reassure the French that he is not so frightening, after all.

The process is already under way. I watched the first round of voting on Sunday night with a group of Sarkozy supporters in a bar in a city their candidate has described as “one of the greatest French cities” – otherwise known as London. There are now so many French people living in Britain (the rough estimate is 300,000) that Mr Sarkozy made a campaign stop in London in January. Then he portrayed his audience as exiles, driven overseas by France’s economic inertia. But in his speech on Sunday, his message was much less radical. There was some shaking of heads among his London supporters, as their man embraced much of the language of the left – promising to “protect” French workers from “unfair competition” from overseas.

Ms Royal, meanwhile, is making her own move to co-opt her rival’s favourite themes. On Sunday night, she made much of the need to increase incentives for work. She also claimed to be the real agent of change. Both candidates are trying to appeal to French nationalism, by talking a lot about national identity and the flag.

This rush for the centre ground in the final two weeks of the campaign may blur the choice. Ìt is certainly possible that a President Sarkozy would disappoint economic liberals, or that a President Royal would surprise those who have written her off as unable to embrace the changes that France needs.

But for all that, the candidates have long records and their tactical shifts will not fundamentally alter their images now. Mr Sarkozy’s attempts at a friendly smile are positively chilling.

In recent polls some 70 per cent of French people have said that they think their country is in decline. But successive attempts at economic reform have foundered on public hostility to the specific changes that might arrest that decline. Meanwhile, unemployment remains stubbornly high, the national debt mounts and everybody waits for the next round of social unrest in the suburbs.

Mr Sarkozy argues that: “The risk isn’t change. The risk is to refuse to change.” The election will turn on whether the voters trust him to deliver that change.