FRANCE: France's Socialists were in crisis yesterday after Laurent Fabius, the former prime minister, was unceremoniously ejected from the leadership for having broken the party line and championed the victorious No vote in last weekend's referendum on the EU constitution.
Mr Fabius, the Socialists' number two, and four of his chief lieutenants were ousted from the party's national secretariat at a stormy six-hour meeting in a Paris hotel one week after 55 per cent of French voters rejected the constitution, triggering a government reshuffle in France and plunging the union into disarray.
The party, torn between a modernising, more free market tendency and a deep-seated opposition to any dilution of the traditional tenets of Gallic socialism, saw its faultlines exposed by the treaty debate. Many members saw the text as the blueprint for a neo-liberal, "Anglo-Saxon" Europe that would destroy France's prized high tax, high protection social model.
It will now hold a national "orientation congress" in November, six months earlier than scheduled, at which it will try to hammer out a coherent platform for the presidential and parliamentary elections of spring 2007. Few give it much of a chance.
After rebounding from disastrous defeats in 2002 to notch up sweeping victories in local, regional and European elections last year, when voters returned to it en masse to punish a deeply unpopular centre-right government, most analysts say the split over the constitution has set the party back months if not years.
"The French Socialist party is mainly composed of civil servants who are by nature reluctant to consider any major policy reforms," said Pascal Perrineau, a political analyst. "It faces some fundamental choices and it's now going to have to make them very fast."
Mr Fabius, prime minister from 1984-86, was instrumental in winning over Socialist votes for the No camp. At an internal referendum to decide the party line in January, 59 per cent of party members approved the treaty - the same figure as finally voted against it.
Party leader Francois Hollande insisted yesterday that Mr Fabius had not been expelled for having advocated a No vote, but because he breached the party's internal rules by failing to respect a democratic decision taken by its members. "This move was not about a punishment or a settling of scores," he said on French radio. "It was a sensible and necessary measure designed to restore coherence to the party leadership. Do you know of any organisation anywhere whose leadership is pulling in two different directions? It is simply not possible."
A stony-faced Mr Fabius said he would "remain true" to his line by "listening to the the French people, trying to reunite the Socialist party and preparing for a victorious campaign" in the 2007 elections.
But he added: "The party leadership has done exactly the opposite of what it should have done." - (Guardian Service)