Paris - The French Socialists just spent two days voting for
a new leader, and the big winner was - President Nicolas Sarkozy.
The conservative Sarkozy is certain to be strenghened by the bad
blood and infighting that marked the Socialist campaign and the
bitter dispute accompanying the results announced early Saturday.
The official vote count of Friday's second round of the election
showed Lille Mayor Martine Aubry edging out former presidential
candidate Segolene Royal by 42 votes out of 137,000 cast, a victory
margin of only 0.04 per cent.
Royal's supporters immediately cried fraud and demanded another
round of voting.
'Some things (in the vote) didn't make sense,' former party
spokesman Julien Dray said.
'This was a democratic farce,' Evry Mayor Manuel Valls protested
on France Info radio. He accused Aubry's supporters of 'cheating' and
compared the vote to the 2000 US presidential election, which was
finally resolved by a controversial Supreme Court decision.
In the middle of the night, as a recount showed her losing the
leadership post by a handful of votes, Royal sent out her lawyer,
Jean-Pierre Mignard, to tell journalists that the results were
'disputed and disputable' and that she wanted to hold another round
of voting.
Specifically, Royal and her supporters claimed that she improved
her results over Thursday's first round of the election in every
region of France except those controlled by Aubry and former prime
minister Laurent Fabius, a strong Aubry supporter.
Not to be outdone, Aubry supporters claimed that irregularities
occurred in regions in the hands of Royal supporters.
The outgoing party leader, Francois Hollande, has called a meeting
of the Socialists' national council for Wednesday to validate the
results and, he hopes, put an end to the brawl.
Aubry supporters hold a majority on the council and she is
virtually certain to be declared the winner, making her the
first-ever female leader of the French Socialist Party.
But that milestone will be overshadowed by the Herculean task she
faces - uniting the badly split party and giving it credibility with
the electorate, so that it will be able to mount a strong challenge
to Sarkozy in the 2012 presidential election.
That will involve reconciling the two factions, ending the bad
blood between her supporters and Royal's and drawing up a political
platform that takes into account the demands of her adversary.
In addition, she and the party will have to dispel the suspicion
that she won through irregular means, that - as Valls charged - the
victory was 'stolen.'
'The only solution is to hold another vote,' Valls told RTL radio
on Saturday. 'If not, the (party) split will last very long.'
But many doubt that even another round of voting, whatever the
outcome, could resolve the split in Socialist Party, because it not
only pits one powerful personality against another, but is also a
division of generations and philosophy.
The 58-year-old Aubry was supported by the party old guard, such
as Fabius, Lionel Jospin - another former prime minister - and Paris
Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, and wants the party to adhere to its
traditional leftist principles.
Royal, 55, presented herself as a renovator and championed cheaper
dues to double party membership to 500,000, installing US-style
primaries and forging an alliance with the centrists to beat Sarkozy
in 2012.
Her supporters, such as Valls, regard themselves as European
Social Democrats in the manner of Britain's Labour Party or the
German Social Democrats.
French media on Saturday invoked the possibility of a joint party
chairmanship, with power divided between Aubry and one of Royal's
lieutenants.
But this could only make the intraparty split more visible and is
not certain to iron out ideological differences between the two
sides.
Whatever the outcome of the dispute, the French Socialist Party
has been badly weakened and may not recover in time to be a viable
opposition party in parliament or to present a serious challenge to
Sarkozy in upcoming elections.
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