France's socialists have been revived but the party has its problems, writes Ruadhán Mac Cormaicin Paris
AS MARTINE Aubry stood at the lectern at the Socialist Party’s head office in Paris and basked in the glory of a famous election triumph on Sunday night, her words drowned out by chants of “Martine, Martine” from the jubilant crowd, she could have been forgiven a wry thought or two about the dramatic turn in her fortunes over the past year.
By any standards, it has been quite a turnaround. Less than a year ago, her nascent leadership of the party was being openly questioned after it won a paltry 16.5 per cent of the vote in European elections and felt the humiliation of nearly being relegated to third place by Europe Écologie, a coalition of left-environmental voices.
Aubry was faring poorly in opinion polls, and having only scraped her way into the leader’s office six months earlier after beating her rival Ségolène Royal by the narrowest of margins – 102 votes out of 135,000 – she struggled to impose herself in a fractious party riven by fresh wounds.
On Sunday night, as exit polls confirmed that voters had given the left control of 21 out of 22 regions in the French metropole, Aubry’s troubles seemed to recede into memory.
"Aubry at the head of a party revived," ran a headline in the left-leaning Libérationyesterday, its front page all pink save for a small blue corner on the right denoting Alsace – the right's last bastion on the electoral map.
"The victory Martine Aubry needed," said Le Figaroalongside a photograph of the socialist leader beaming through a crush of cameras.
The implication is clear. Overnight, Aubry has become the credible leader of the resurgent left. Attention now turns to the two-year run-in to the next presidential election.
The 59-year-old, daughter of former European Commission president Jacques Delors, is a low-key public speaker known as a tough and tenacious politician. The first woman to lead one of France’s major parties, she was one of the most popular figures in then prime minister Lionel Jospin’s socialist government before she left in 2000 to campaign for the post of mayor of Lille, which she still holds.
As employment minister, she oversaw the introduction of that government’s signature reform, the 35-hour working week (also known as the “Aubry Law”), and a series of important youth employment schemes credited with taking hundreds of thousands out of the dole queues.
When she beat Royal to take the leadership in 2008, Aubry promised to keep the party “anchored to the left”. She struck a similar note in the regional campaign, taking advantage of the revival of dirigiste orthodoxy to appeal to traditional socialist voters who might have been tempted by the greens or the communists.
But while the weekend’s results will have buoyed Aubry, her party has plenty of problems. First is the prospect of a bloody fight for the presidential nomination. Royal has done little to conceal her hope of running in 2012, and her strong performance after a quasi-independent campaign in the Poitou-Charentes region (she won 60 per cent in the second round – 5 per cent more than last time) – is expected to signal the beginning of a new, national campaign, renewing the legendary enmity between her and Aubry. Since losing out on the leadership, Royal has broken with the party leadership, built her own power base, courted left-wing allies outside the party and travelled the country giving evangelical-style speeches in an effort to bolster her support.
With several other candidates having already declared, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, widely expected to follow suit, the race for the presidential nomination could well reopen party divisions.
Moreover, the party has yet to set out a comprehensive set of policy alternatives to the current government, and the suspicion that the left’s strong showing had as much to do with disapproval of the government as enthusiasm for the opposition was tacitly acknowledged by several high-ranking socialists.
Especially troubling is the socialists’ failure to win more of the working-class vote. “This vote is an encouragement, but also a call to win back the confidence of French people,” Aubry said.
Recent history warns the socialists not to read too much into success in regional elections. After all, the party had a sweeping win in 2004 only to lose the presidential election to Nicolas Sarkozy three years later.