Today, Thursday November 20th, the French Socialist Party, the main one in opposition to the Sarkozy’s government, is voting to choose its leader to replace the outgoing chief François Hollande. At their annual congress in Reims at the weekend, top party members failed to reach consensus and the mood among the socialists deteriorated. Now there are three contenders to the succession of Hollande who used to be the private-life partner of Ségolène Royal and father of her four children. She herself was the candidate to the presidency who lost to Sarkozy and now is one of the three main contenders for the post of leader of the socialists. The other two candidates are: Martine Aubry, an active member of the French Socialist Party who under other French administrations was Minister of Labour and Minister of social affairs. Since 2001 she has been Mayor of Lille (in the north of France) and she is considered as a possible candidate for President of France in 2012. She is mostly known for having pushed the controversial 35-hour workweek law reducing the nominal length of the full-time working week from 39 to 35 hours. The third candidate left and the youngest (he was born in 1967) is Benoît Hamon a French politician and Member of the European Parliament for the East of France.
Hopefully, by tomorrow there will be a new leader of the French Socialist Party. They have a lot of work to do if they want to go against Sarkozy in 2012! According to the left-wing newspaper Liberation, “Sarkozy knows that he has before him an ungovernable Socialist Party, without a clear political line, without a strategy, without an uncontested leader”.
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