Leadership Fight Frays Socialist Party in France

PARIS, Nov. 22 -- France's once-reigning Socialist Party, the main opposition to President Nicolas Sarkozy, fell into full disarray Saturday over a backbiting leadership struggle that betrayed deep divisions about the role of a leftist party in modern France.

The dispute marked another chapter in the national decline of the organized left, leaving a largely open playing field in the near future for Sarkozy and a coalition of Gaullist-oriented parties that control the legislature as well as the presidency.

The party's unraveling at the top also seemed to portend longer-term difficulties for a movement that helped propel François Mitterrand to the presidency in 1981, underpinned a leftist majority in Parliament from 1997 to 2002 and still holds a majority of city halls and local posts. In addition to clashing personal ambitions and friction among veterans and upstarts, it centered on disagreement over what the party should stand for -- vague social democracy reaching toward the center or statist policies more in tune with traditional Socialist ideology.

After counting and recounting all night, the party announced that Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille who advocates close ties to labor unions, had won a bitterly fought election by 42 votes out of about 135,000 cast and would be the next first secretary. But her opponent in the second round of voting, former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, immediately asserted that the count was marred by fraud and demanded another ballot.

"There was fraud, there was cheating," Manuel Valls, a member of Parliament and one of Royal's top lieutenants, said in a television interview. "I call for the membership to rebel."

The outgoing first secretary, François Hollande, Royal's longtime companion until last year and the father of her four children, said the party's National Council would meet Tuesday evening to rule on the dispute. Hollande, who said last week he was ashamed of the party and its inability to come together against Sarkozy, urged Aubry and Royal to keep their cool in the meantime for the good of the movement.

But the unseemly split, on the heels of a party congress last weekend marked by rancor and discord, appeared to have already undermined the party's standing in public opinion, even among its own members. The political commentator Alain Duhamel called it a "disaster," and newspaper reports were full of expressions of disappointment from the rank and file.

"Everybody knows our party is not in good health," Aubry acknowledged in a victory statement late Saturday.

An Internet commentator on the site of Le Monde newspaper, identifying himself as Jean T., called the outcome "a great victory for Sarko."

Sarkozy made no comment, but reports quoting his aides depicted him as reveling in the open battle. To some degree, the reports said, Sarkozy has taken credit for nudging it along. He has given ministries and other posts to several Socialist figures, for instance, sowing distrust in the ranks. And in pushing President Bush for a summit conference on the world financial crisis, he specified Nov. 15 as a date, guaranteeing the summit would overlap -- and eclipse -- the Socialist Party congress.

Royal, 55, sought to lead the party on the basis of her respectable showing against Sarkozy in last year's presidential election and the promise that she could be a strong candidate again in 2012. To improve chances of winning, she suggested, the party could seek alliances in the center, particularly with the Democratic Movement of François Bayrou. Unsaid, but clearly part of the suggestion, was the idea that her soft image and broad appeal on television would aid that approach.

But Aubry, 58, a former labor minister who championed France's 35-hour workweek, decried that suggestion as a betrayal of Socialist ideals. She was backed by party elders, called the "elephants" because of their longevity, and by a slice of young activists eager to see the party return to the purity of its roots.

In fact, those roots have been indistinct for more than two decades. Mitterrand won election in 1981 in alliance with the Communist Party on a distinctly leftist program. But within three years, he broke the alliance and began privatizing big state holdings. By the time he ran for reelection in 1988, he was campaigning on a conservative platform and describing himself as "the tranquil force."

The party's erstwhile allies in the Communist Party, meanwhile, have almost faded from the scene. Their presidential candidate in last year's election, Marie-George Buffet, got 1.94 percent of the vote.