PARIS: A day after President Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative party captured a narrower majority in Parliament than expected, France's Socialist Party was struggling to adjust to the awkward reality that its first couple - Ségolène Royal and François Hollande - had split up.
The revelation, which was disclosed just hours after the polls closed Sunday night, threatens to complicate efforts by the Socialist Party to close ranks and serve as a counterweight to the powerful and well-disciplined machine of Sarkozy's new government.
"It's as if the parents have gotten divorced and now have to decide who's going to run the family and look after of the children," said Stéphane Rozès, a director of the CSA polling institute.
The popular tabloid Le Parisien devoted its front page to their saga, with a photo of the glum-looking pair under the banner headline, "The Rupture."
The better than expected showing by the Socialists and their leftist allies was attributed in part to a clumsy initiative unveiled by the Sarkozy government last week to increase the consumer sales tax known as the value added tax.
Sarkozy's ministers were under instructions not to discuss the issue until next year, but Jean-Louis Borloo, the economy minister, disclosed last week that the tax increase was under consideration. Then Prime Minister François Fillon made matters worse by defending the idea.
Sarkozy believes that France creates fewer jobs that other European countries because of the very high "social charges" that employers must pay to fund health care, unemployment benefits and pensions for their workers. An increase in the VAT - now 19.6 percent - would be aimed at shifting part of the cost away from employers and onto consumers.
But taxes on consumers are highly unpopular, and the left cleverly hammered voters with the message that these taxes would fall on the average citizen at a time when the government was pressing ahead with an initiative to cut income, wealth and inheritance taxes for the rich.
In a number of polls before Sunday's election, 60 percent of those responding said they were opposed to the tax increase. The Socialists mocked Sarkozy, saying his call for the French to "work more to earn more" was in reality a plan to "work more to pay more."
"The government truly struck a false note," said Emmanuel Rivière, a director at the Sofres polling institute.
A former conservative prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, estimated on Sunday night that the consumer tax imbroglio cost the governing Union for a Popular Movement party 60 seats.
But in the aftermath of the election, there seemed to be as much attention on the private lives of the Socialist Party's power couple as on reasons for the electoral outcome.
Both Royal, 53, the defeated Socialist candidate for president, and Hollande, 52, the father of their four children and head of the Socialist Party, used the French media on Monday to separately spin their stories.
In traditional French political style, Hollande sought to portray the separation as a private affair.
"I always have been careful to separate politics, which must have principles, rules and foundations, from private life, which must be protected," he told France Info radio, adding that the separation "will not have political consequences."
By contrast, Royal portrayed herself as a scorned woman who needed to take charge of her destiny.
"I have asked François to live his life his way, and he accepted," Royal told France Inter radio in an interview taped Saturday. "This is a separation of fact: We no longer live in the same home."
Not one to hide her ambition, she said that the separation from her partner of nearly three decades now allows her to pursue her own bid for leadership of the party.
"I believe we have reached a new stage," she said. "It was necessary to put things right," to "clarify" the relationship before she pursued the position.
Neither said when they had parted.
It has been an open secret that the never married duo has been less than a couple for some time. The revelation of the separation came in a book to be published on Wednesday in which Royal essentially accuses Hollande of having an extramarital relationship.
The split adds a worrisome dimension to the Socialist Party leadership at a time when it is mired in a deep debate over whether to stay true to its traditional leftist values or move to the center.
Hollande, for example, who plans to hold on to the party leadership position until after municipal elections next year, opposed the proposals by some leading Socialists and the overtures by Royal to align with centrist politicians.
In an interview in Le Monde on Tuesday, he went further, saying that he wants to "federate" France's entire left into a "grand party" and to "settle once and for all the question of the relationship with the voters of the center."
The new 577-member National Assembly is substantially more female than the previous one: 107 of the new deputies are women, compared with 71 in the old body.
Only 16 deputies are black, 15 of them from France's overseas territories and the other being George Pau-Langevin, a Guadeloupe-born woman lawyer from the working-class 20th arrondissement in Paris. The only candidate of North African origin who made it into the second round lost on Sunday. The average age of the new National Assembly is 55, slightly lower than the outgoing one.
Perhaps the poorest loser in the vote Sunday was Alain Juppé, a former prime minister, the mayor of Bordeaux and Sarkozy's mega-minister for the environment, transport and energy who was forced to resign from his ministry after his defeat.
"What you want is for me to feel very, very bad," Juppé told reporters at the opening of Vinexpo, the world's largest wine fair, in Bordeaux. Accusing them of taking perverse pleasure in his defeat, he added, "You'd be happy if I would die."
Source : www.iht.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment