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| French Socialists clash as Aubry wins leadership vote |
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Time is GMT + 8 hours
Posted: 22-Nov-2008 21:27 hrs |
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| Lille Mayor Martine Aubry at the French National Assembly in Paris. France's opposition Socialists descended into open political warfare after ex-presidential candidate Segolene Royal refused to concede defeat to Aubry in a party leadership vote. |
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France's opposition Socialists descended into political warfare on Saturday after Martine Aubry won a party leadership vote by a razor-thin margin and rival Segolene Royal refused to concede defeat.. Aubry, the mayor of Lille and architect of the 35-hour work week, was declared the winner by 42 votes out of more than 137,000 cast in a ballot by party members on Friday.. Royal, who was defeated by right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy in last year's presidential elections, accused the rival camp of vote-tampering and demanded a re-vote.. "I am not going to take this," Royal told AFP.. Aubry, 58, shot back that "there is no reason" for a new ballot and appealed to the rival camp to "act responsibly or else our party's situation will only get worse.". The dispute pushed the already deeply-divided Socialist Party closer to a formal split and a full-blown confrontation between the leftist old guard backing Aubry and Royal's centre-left followers.. Aubry won 50.02 percent of the vote against 49.98 percent for Royal, according to official results released by the party leadership.. Outgoing leader Francois Hollande, Royal's former partner, called an emergency meeting for next week of the party's national council that will likely validate the result.. The contested result capped weeks of bitter campaigning that laid bare the party's utter disarray.. Julien Dray, a top Royal aide, charged that there had been irregularities in vote counting at party offices and that some poll officials had refused to sign off on the final tally sheet.. "Martine Aubry did not win," Dray told AFP. "We are contesting these results. There are problems with them. The only solution at this point is a re-vote.". The defeat was a blow to Royal, who has been eager for a rematch with Sarkozy in 2012.. The 55-year-old president of the Poitou-Charentes regional council had come out in pole position in the first round of voting on Thursday but fell short of a winning majority.. Royal could still in theory seek the party nomination in 2011.. During the campaign, she had promised to reshape France's left by opening the party's doors to a young membership and possibly forging an alliance with centrists to beat Sarkozy.. Aubry vowed to keep the party "solidly anchored to the left," warning that a shift to the centre would alienate its traditional voter base at a time when the financial crisis has revived leftist state-driven economics.. Aubry's first order of business will be to unite the party and show that she is not the captain of a sinking ship.. "There is a crisis, we can't deny that, and we must find solutions," said deputy and Aubry supporter Francois Lamy. "But she is indisputably the winner.". After three consecutive defeats in presidential elections, the Socialists have been bogged down in internal squabbling and unable to score any points off Sarkozy since he took office last year.. Sarkozy's UMP party scoffed at the outcome of the leadership race.. "I salute the Socialists' talent for self-destruction," quipped spokesman Dominique Paille.. "This party has decided not to choose and imploded," commented Frederic Lefebvre, another spokesman for the governing Union for a Popular Movement party.. A plain, no-nonsense politician, Aubry harboured a personal enmity toward Royal, dismissing her as a self-centred political lightweight who sought to turn the party into her own personal electoral machine.. Contrary to Royal, Aubry has kept silent about her ambitions, arguing that the party leadership must be separate from the presidential nomination.. The daughter of former European Commission president Jacques Delors is making a comeback after several years spent in the political wilderness in municipal politics in northern France.. As labour minister in the late 1990s, Aubry drafted legislation creating the 35-hour work week, a flagship Socialist measure that Sarkozy has sought to unravel and which has been criticised even within the party.. The endless feuding has left most commentators wondering whether the party of late president Francois Mitterrand can become a potential governing force in time for the 2012 election.. "This is very serious," commented political expert Gerard Grunberg.. "I don't rule out a schism," he cautioned, adding that the Socialists would be reluctant to commit "political suicide.". "At the same time, the personal hatreds have gone up a notch," he said. — AFP
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