photo: AFP
The French Socialist Party's search for a leader, already a long, long drama, has recently turned into a farce. For 18 months, ever since right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president, the Socialists have been so busy turning on each other that "Sarko," as he's called, has been able to act as if there's no opposition at all. And a vote by party members that was supposed to put an end to the backbiting last week only opened up a whole new round of bloodletting. The doggedly determined Martine Aubry, mother of the country's problematic 35-hour work week, declared victory Saturday after 134,000 ballots were counted. But her margin was a razor-thin 42 votes. So former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal is lobbying for a new round amid allegations of fraud, counter-charges of defamation and threatened court action. A party congress will pronounce on the results tonight, after two days of candidates’ representatives trading examples and counterexamples of accounting irregularities before a hastily assembled commission. And Royal might actually squeak ahead by a ballot or two. But, here's the thing: the biggest win for Ségolène Royal would be a loss.
Royal has never really been embraced by her party. At 55, she may have garnered the Socialist nomination for the 2007 presidential run, and borne four children to the outgoing Socialist Party leader, François Hollande. She may have been a second-string cabinet minister in Socialist governments through the 1990s and an advisor to France’s only Socialist president, François Mitterrand, through the 1980s. But none of that has been enough to make her an acceptable apparatchik in the eyes of her peers. Au contraire! She is derided – despised is not too strong a word – as an outsider. But she has learned to make that her greatest strength.
Considered at best a secondary figure in the party until 2006, Royal's bid for the presidential nomination seemed to come out of nowhere when she ran against two of the party's heavyweights. Former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius and former Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn (now head of the International Monetary Fund) openly mocked Royal’s chances -- then lost to her by humiliating margins. She went on to lead a campaign mostly outside the party’s ambit. It was headquartered, literally, outside the walls of the party's main building, drawing its strength from a massive internet-based campaign for direct “participative” democracy, which endeared her to the little people and but only stoked the ire of party veterans. Even party leader Hollande, Royal's consort, kept his distance from her, while their son Thomas campaigned with maman. (It was later revealed the couple had split secretly, and acrimoniously.) So the moment Royal lost to Sarkozy, by a 47-53 margin on May 6, 2007, the knives came out. Socialist heavyweights blamed Royal en masse. But as recent weeks have shown, much of the base stuck with her.
Royal surprised everyone on November 6 when her motion for the new Socialist Party platform secured the most votes from the party faithful. It won 29 percent support, with Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë's proposal second and Martine Aubry third. Party custom has it that the sponsors of the losing motions look for compromises to gather behind the winning motion, but Royal couldn’t find that consensus. At the disastrous party convention that followed, the aspiring leaders whose motions she beat couldn’t get together enough to join forces, but were decided not to let her take the party in the leadership vote that followed.
Royal promised “a big popular party.” She promised to break open the Socialists' clunky political apparatus, involve the base in key decision-making, proposing a sort of “Socialist Facebook” and referenda on new ideas. One of those, her belief that the Socialist Party should keep open the option of allying with both leftists and centrists to beat Sarkozy in 2012, was particularly controversial. Faced with Sarkozy's proven ability to co-opt the right, the middle and even some stars of the moderate left, like French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, the party hacks seem determined to cling to margins.
Royal, meanwhile, has adopted a fairly funky new image. She’s dropped the chic, white-jacket-and-skirt look that became her trademark during the presidential campaign and now favors colouful Indian-style tunics over jeans. At a September political rally she mixed politics with musical acts. Critics disparaged the show as “too American” and her speech as “too religious,” “too mystical,” when she chanted “Fra-ter-ni-té” over and over to 4,000 supporters. “When I talk about fraternity, some snicker, but when Barack Obama based his campaign on fraternity everybody was blissful with admiration,” she responded on French radio last week. “Well, people will get used to it. They’ll get used to my political identity. They’ll get used to me remaining myself to better change the Socialist Party.”
The winner – for now – meanwhile -- sort of is Martine Aubry, 58, who's quite popular in lefty apparatchik circles. The daughter of former European Commissioner Jacques Delors, she has headed more prestigious government ministries than Royal and has drawn support from politically disparate Socialist Party heavyweights like Fabius and allies of Strauss-Kahn, known as “les éléphants." Aubry warned members that Royal would turn the Socialist Party into a “party of fans” rather than one of activists. And she has ruled out, four years in advance, allying with the center in 2012, saying she would only entertain alliances with staunch leftists like the Communist Party. After the preliminary rounds last week, Aubry was supposed to collect everybody else's votes and beat Royal handily. But she didn’t.
For now, it would seem, the disparate front of party traditionalists overtly opposed to Royal could manage no more than 50.02 percent of the vote. Indeed, while leaked numbers vary, Royal’s second-in-command this morning alleged that the margin had narrowed… to only four votes. Tonight, the party’s national council will rule on the results. The council is in its majority hostile to Royal, who only has 29 percent of the members (in line with the percentage of votes she picked up November 6, with her winning party line). She has called for a new vote, while her camp has threatened demonstrations and even legal action if its electoral complaints aren’t heard. All of that risks prolonging the party’s agony while sounding whiny to public opinion.
But if Royal loses tonight, and calls off her dogs, she may well wind up ahead in the long term.
“Ségolène Royal doesn’t come out of this fight weakened, far from it,” says Zaki Laïdi of the Centre for European Studies in Paris. He argues that the close scores show, first and foremost, the failure of the party heavyweights’ strategy of Royal “containment.” “Very honestly, I never believed as much in Ségolène Royal’s political chances as I do today, because she’s shown a capacity to fight and to overcome obstacles. It shows that they’re having more and more trouble containing her. Every time you think she’s dead, she charges back.”
“If there is one lesson here, I think it’s that the rise in strength and the control of Ségolène Royal now is paradoxically inexorable,” concludes Laïdi.
“In any case, she wins,’ concurs Gérard Grunberg, of Paris’s Institute of Political Studies. “First, the rest are divided: all those against her are divided. Next, they will be on the defensive all the time, because they defend the old ideas. And third, I think she is very, very intelligent at appearing as the victim. She’ll develop the argument ‘The Socialists wanted change. Change was prevented.’ So I wouldn’t be surprised if she goes up in the polls more than Martine Aubry.” And while Royal is free to make her case, Aubry, of course, would be stuck putting the pieces back together at party headquarters. Royal would be able to claim as much favor with the party faithful as Aubry, but operate as she has in the past, as the outsider from the inside. She will have one foot in the party with her representation on the national council and one foot out. The leader’s term is only three years, meaning the job will be up for grabs again in plenty of time for the 2012 presidential campaign.
So as the Socialist Party’s “parliament” gets set to meet tonight to parse an impossibly close ballot and take the next step, the political advice to Royal seems clear: Protest, lady, but not too much. Not enough to get stuck winning.
(Photo by AFP/Miguel Medina)
