French Socialists vote - and it's Sarkozy who wins (News Feature)

By Siegfried Mortkowitz Nov 22, 2008, 9:37 GMT

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.