Hair shirts and Gucci shoes as French Socialists fight for soul of the left
Jon Henley in La Rochelle Monday August 29, 2005 Guardian
Sartorially speaking, France's Socialists are a mixed bag: canvas shorts and ageing deckshoes mingle with pristine polos and Gucci loafers; Issey Miyake miniskirts and Prada pumps with torn T-shirts and espadrilles.
What is more exceptional, judging from the 2,300 who attended the party's summer school in the late August sunshine of La Rochelle this weekend, is that their politics are a great deal more disparate than their taste in footwear.
Facing probably the most serious internal crisis in their history, the members of France's main opposition party can agree on very little bar their dislike of the current centre-right government and their disapproval of Tony Blair.
They are not, however, downhearted. "We are in the throes of a democratic debate that's at the extreme limit of the possible," said Jean-Louis Jacquet, a bearded pipe-smoker who has been a member since 1974. "But we've been here before. I'm confident we'll come through again."
On the terrace outside the cavernous dockside congress centre, in a break between workshops, Vartan Arzoumanian, a 20-something activist from Marseille, agreed. "It's bubbling," he said. "Tensions are running high. But I really think everyone's trying to pull together."
Many observers are not so sure. Some senior figures on the left are even calling for the Parti Socialiste to split. "Should we risk a schism in the PS?" asked Bernard Kouchner, a former health minister, last week. "Yes. We have gone beyond the time for superficial reconciliations."
What, if anything, the party agrees on will - along with its presidential candidate - be formally decided at a congress in Le Mans in November. In the meantime, the slogan of the summer school was a hopeful: "Combat the right. Come up with some ideas on the left."
The ideological cracks in France's Socialist edifice began widening long before May's referendum on the EU constitution, and could no longer be papered over once a majority of the PS's voters had defied their leaders and voted no.
The party ran France from 1997 to 2002 in a coalition with the Communists and Greens, but now holds just 150 of the 577 seats in the national assembly. It swept the board in last year's regional and European polls and looked well on track for the 2007 general elections - until disaster struck in the form of the no vote.
Now at least six factions are fighting for the party's identity. It is a battle that the rest of Europe's socialists fought some years ago - one that ended, essentially, in them accepting the market economy, recognising it as the most efficient means of producing wealth, and aiming to distinguish themselves from the right by how that wealth is distributed. Here, it is still being fought. The French no vote, fuelled by fears of the perceived liberal, free-market nature of the EU treaty, made plain the enduring attractiveness of hard-left, no-compromise, anti-capitalist politics.
"This party is not in crisis, it's in a coma," said Jean-Marie Bockel, senator, mayor of Mulhouse and the only member to declare himself a Blairite. "We're still debating Marxist ideology, for God's sake. Blame it on 30 years of intellectual laziness, and the arrogance born of the assumption that France will always and automatically lead the way in progressive politics."
While they did their smiling best to deny it at La Rochelle, a clutch of rival (and often internally divided) radical clans is trying to drag the PS back from the social democratic (ie Blairite) brink on which they claim it is teetering, and reclaim it for "real" socialism.
Their leaders are men such as Laurent Fabius, a widely disliked but politically astute former prime minister; a charismatic one-time party treasurer, Henri Emmanuelli; and an eloquent if boyish lawyer, Arnaud Montebourg, who heads a group unambiguously called Le Nouveau Parti Socialiste.
Opposing them, and still just about benefiting from the backing of party MPs and regional federations, is the marginally more "realistic" party hierarchy headed by the owlish general secretary, François Hollande, and former ministers Jack Lang, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Martine Aubry.
Not much digging was needed at La Rochelle to reveal the vitriol. "I have no words to describe Fabius," said one delegate. "He's a traitor, a cynic, a peddler of dreams." Another said the leadership "has to go. They're totally out of touch with the mood of the party and the country. They're closet Blairites, pushing right-wing policies under a cloak of socialism."
Few arguments summed up the state of the party like that between Françoise Brassart, Mario Martinet and Frederic Vigouroux, three long-standing members from the south. The first backed Mr Hollande: "We have to be realistic, offer attainable solutions. We just can't promise the moon." The second supported the centrist Mr Strauss-Kahn: "But politics cannot control the global economy! At best we can try to regulate it, around the edges."
The third was Gallic socialism at its best. "We will never accept that the market knows better than the state," stormed Mr Vigouroux. "Capitalism is misery. It is up to France to show Europe the way, as it always has done. We were the first to overthrow our king, and we'll be the first to overthrow social democracy. You'll see."
On this showing, the chances of France's Socialists agreeing on a single platform by November look slim. And the chances of a single leader being able to explain it to France's voters look even slimmer.