FRANCE: The socialist politician Lionel Jospin gave up hope of becoming president of France for the third and probably last time yesterday, announcing in a radio interview: "Since I cannot rally [ the party to my candidacy], I do not want to divide it. So I will not be a candidate for the investiture."
Mr Jospin lost presidential races in 1995 and 2002. On the night the extreme right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen beat him in the first round of the 2002 presidential election, he promised to withdraw from politics forever.
But three months ago Mr Jospin announced his "availability" for the socialist party's nomination, which will be decided in an internal primary in November, offering himself as a "recourse" against the seemingly unstoppable rise of Ségolène Royal.
Mr Jospin's low score in opinion polls - about 20 per cent of socialist supporters - has barely flickered, while Ms Royal, who served as a junior minister in the 1997-2002 Jospin governments, outranks all socialist contenders by a wide margin.
Ms Royal is expected to officially declare her candidacy tonight in the southern French town of Vitrolles, which the socialists won back from the extreme right-wing National Front in the last municipal elections.
She is the main beneficiary of Mr Jospin's decision, though he made it clear he will not support her presidential bid.
Socialist candidates for the primary are required to declare themselves by October 3rd. The former prime minister Laurent Fabius, the former finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the former culture and education minister Jack Lang are expected to challenge Ms Royal. The second runner-up in the first round of the primary on November 16th will hope to gain the other men's votes and beat Ms Royal a week later.
In his usual abstruse way, Mr Jospin told RTL radio: "I think you have guessed, regarding the approach to politics, the relationship with citizens, the way of considering the socialist party, that there is one choice I will not make in favour of one of the candidates."
His use of the feminine form of the word "candidate" indicated he would not support Ms Royal.
Mr Jospin's letter to socialist party militants yesterday made further negative allusions to Ms Royal, denouncing "the force of pressure exerted on the party and within the party in the name of opinion" and criticising "the idea that some seem to have of the presidential election, of their distance from the demands of the left and the way they intend to win the votes of party members".
Ms Royal was in Dakar, Senegal, when she learned that Mr Jospin was about to pull out of the race.
"I'm waiting to see," she said on the aircraft bringing her back to Paris early yesterday. "He could change his mind again on Monday."
At the beginning of the week, Mr Jospin seemed on the verge of declaring his candidacy, telling France-Inter radio: "My mother was a midwife. I will carry this to term."
Nicolas Sarkozy, the right-wing presidential candidate, wrested President Jacques Chirac's UMP party from him in a sort of internal coup. Now Ms Royal appears to have accomplished a similar feat by outwitting the socialist party's patriarch. She has the added advantage of living with the party's leader Francois Hollande, with whom she has four children.
In the columns of Le Monde, Francois Rebsamen, the party's number two, urged Mr Jospin to give up for the sake of the renewal of the party and victory in the presidential election next May.
Almost half of the socialists' 90 departmental federations have declared support for Ms Royal, and more are expected to join once her partner, Mr Hollande, makes his position clear.