Ségolène Royal Wins… Especially If She Loses.

[frigidmagi]

Newsweek

[quote]he French Socialist Party's search for a leader, already a long, long drama, has recently turned into a farce. For 18 months, ever since right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president, the Socialists have been so busy turning on each other that "Sarko," as he's called, has been able to act as if there's no opposition at all. And a vote by party members that was supposed to put an end to the backbiting last week only opened up a whole new round of bloodletting. The doggedly determined Martine Aubry, mother of the country's problematic 35-hour work week, declared victory Saturday after 134,000 ballots were counted. But her margin was a razor-thin 42 votes. So former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal is lobbying for a new round amid allegations of fraud, counter-charges of defamation and threatened court action. A party congress will pronounce on the results tonight, after two days of candidates’ representatives trading examples and counterexamples of accounting irregularities before a hastily assembled commission. And Royal might actually squeak ahead by a ballot or two. But, here's the thing: the biggest win for Ségolène Royal would be a loss.

Royal has never really been embraced by her party. At 55, she may have garnered the Socialist nomination for the 2007 presidential run, and borne four children to the outgoing Socialist Party leader, François Hollande. She may have been a second-string cabinet minister in Socialist governments through the 1990s and an advisor to France’s only Socialist president, François Mitterrand, through the 1980s. But none of that has been enough to make her an acceptable apparatchik in the eyes of her peers. Au contraire! She is derided – despised is not too strong a word – as an outsider. But she has learned to make that her greatest strength.

Considered at best a secondary figure in the party until 2006, Royal's bid for the presidential nomination seemed to come out of nowhere when she ran against two of the party's heavyweights. Former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius and former Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn (now head of the International Monetary Fund) openly mocked Royal’s chances -- then lost to her by humiliating margins. She went on to lead a campaign mostly outside the party’s ambit. It was headquartered, literally, outside the walls of the party's main building, drawing its strength from a massive internet-based campaign for direct “participativeâ€

[General Havoc]

Ah the French Socialist party...

I've followed Segolene Royal off and on for a couple years now (French politics are a hobby of mine). I think the Socialists would be well-served with her as the leader, particularly after the disappointments they've suffered in the last decade or so.