In France, Ailing Socialist Party on Mission to Rebuild

PARIS, Aug. 29 -- Deserted by voters and torn by internal rivalries, France's once-powerful Socialist Party sought at a seaside convention this weekend to restore morale and find a way to mount a credible challenge to President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The party leader, Martine Aubry, promised that the faltering apparatus would be renovated from top to bottom to devise a clear political direction and reach consensus on a presidential candidate for 2012. But members remained split on what direction the party should take, and a half-dozen figures vied for attention as possible presidential contenders.

The most talked-about issues at the gathering, in La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast, illustrated the main difficulties facing the Socialist organization, whose ideology has become fuzzy and whose leadership has not produced a star-quality candidate. Instead of a political redefinition and an eye-catching champion to oppose the conservative Sarkozy, activists discussed mostly procedure -- a special convention in October, electoral alliances with other parties and the wisdom of a primary ahead of the 2012 vote.

The themes of the convention, an annual strategy session called "summer university," underlined how far the party has fallen since the late François Mitterrand used it as a vehicle to unite the French left and win two terms as president, from 1981 to 1995. Although still strong in city halls, the Socialist Party has since declined so visibly on the national scene that some of its own supporters have predicted it could fall apart soon.

Aside from the lack of a compelling leader, the party has suffered from a drift away from the traditional doctrine of state ownership of the economy toward a form of social democracy, embracing the market economy alongside strong social protections. As a result, there has been less and less to differentiate the party from its rivals on the right, particularly Sarkozy's pragmatic brand of conservatism.

"Although one cannot envisage democracy without an opposition, the main opposition party must show an ability to represent a plan for France," Sarkozy's budget minister, Eric Woerth, said in an essay in the pro-Sarkozy Figaro newspaper. "However, Socialist Party leaders at La Rochelle are not getting ready to debate such a plan, but rather their internal questions yet again."

eclipsed by Sarkozy's activism, the party lost support during a much-criticized leadership struggle last fall, during which it seemed to be worried more about itself than the economic crisis battering France. That struggle ended -- but was not really resolved -- with the election of Aubry, the mayor of Lille, as first secretary. She edged out Ségolène Royal, the Socialist presidential candidate who lost to Sarkozy in 2007 but has not abandoned hope of trying again in 2012.

Party faithful were even more disheartened when their candidates garnered only 16.5 percent of the vote for the European Parliament in June. That showing was just a touch ahead of the Greens, a party of environmentalists formerly regarded as a fringe movement. It was widely interpreted as a testament to the Socialists' lack of popularity even among their natural constituency, left-leaning voters angry over the global financial crisis.

Against that background, Aubry pledged in an opening speech Friday to renovate the party "from A to Z" and undertake a broad consultation with members in October. Among the issues to be decided, she said, was whether the party should choose its next candidate in a primary -- she proposed it should be held next year -- and, if so, whether the voting should be open to all or just party members.

The issue is sensitive because some up-and-coming party leaders have proposed opening the primary to anybody who wants to vote, while at the same time entering into electoral alliances with other leftist or centrist parties such as François Bayrou's Democratic Movement. Left unsaid, but clearly a concern among Socialists, was the likelihood that the direction of such alliances -- left or right -- would influence the party's own direction and perhaps further dilute its ideology.

Conscious of the danger, François Hollande, Aubry's predecessor and Royal's former longtime companion, told reporters Saturday that the primary should be limited to Socialists. Other groups could coalesce around the Socialist candidate, he added, but "Socialists should choose a Socialist candidate."

Vincent Peillon, a younger party leader, staged a much-discussed photo during a political meeting last week in Marseille designed to promote another approach. The shot showed Peillon along with Communist Party stalwart Robert Hue; Greens leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit; and Bayrou's second-in-command in the Democratic Movement, Marielle de Sarnez.

Peillon called on Socialists to abandon their "sectarian attitude" and join forces with parties to the right and left of their own beliefs. "When one makes great reforms, it is always with others," he said.

Aubry cautioned in her speech, however, that opposing Sarkozy was not enough to reinvigorate the Socialist Party or recapture the presidency. Instead, she promised a careful polling of the faithful and a new political platform that would define its political principles more clearly.

"Renovation is a democratic imperative," she said, according to reports from La Rochelle. "We must move from words to deeds. Renovation is necessary. But to be credible, we must link the party's restructuring with the restructuring of ideas."