Leading presidential contender Segolene Royal has angered French teachers, core voters for her Socialist Party, by suggesting they spend more time in schools and less time giving private lessons.
Video footage, apparently shot during a January meeting in the western town of Angers, has put Royal on the defensive a week before Thursday's internal party ballot to pick the Socialist candidate for the 2007 presidential election.
A number of websites have carried the video footage of Royal explaining her "revolutionary" view that teachers should spend 35 hours in schools, even if they are not teaching.
"I think that one of the revolutions is to ensure the 35 hours in secondary schools. That is to say that teachers spend 35 hours in the school," she said in the video.
"I'm not going to shout it from the rooftops yet because I don't want the teaching unions to attack me," said Royal, adding teachers should give free after-school classes to help weaker students rather than earn cash from private tuition.
"The method is quite reprehensible," Royal said in the weekend edition of the Le Monde newspaper. "Subtitles have been added to a barely audible soundtrack. These are end-of-campaign methods."
Teachers account for an estimated 15 percent of the party's 200,000 members and teaching unions reacted sharply, although they were also wary of fuelling a damaging public row. "I am surprised someone who has been a junior (education) minister can come out with something like that," said Gerard Aschieri, general secretary of the main FSU teaching union.
"It touches an issue that is very sensitive with colleagues, and touches it in a very unfortunate way," he said, adding the emergence of the clip was "not innocent." Party leader Francois Hollande, already accused of favouring Royal, his partner, throughout the campaign, said Royal had raised a legitimate issue but condemned the video's release.
"The debate has not been launched in an appropriate manner," he said on Europe 1 radio on Saturday. "You don't have a public debate with pirated videos."
The video is doubly embarrassing for Royal who has pioneered "participatory democracy" and the Internet - her blog helped launch her campaign - to portray herself as a modern but down-to-earth leader in touch with real people's views.
Some Socialist stalwarts dismiss her as a lightweight but opinion polls show her as the only Socialist able to beat leading right-wing presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy.
Her rival Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former finance minister, has gained ground on Royal in recent weeks. He told TV5 television: "We can't do anything in schools if it's against the teachers."
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