Source:
NYTPARIS — France’s Socialist Party found itself deeply divided on Sunday and, even worse, harshly mocked. A summer of embarrassing rivalries has culminated in an excruciatingly narrow and disputed vote for a new party leader that is likely to please chiefly the country’s center-right president, Nicolas Sarkozy.
The Socialists are known for their intellectual disputes; part of the leadership race involved a vote on political platforms written or supported by the various candidates. But much worse for the party, it is now being ridiculed for its personal enmities and rivalries, making it seem less a serious political alternative than an afternoon soap opera.
Jean-Michel Normand, writing for Monday’s Le Monde, a newspaper sympathetic to the party, said bluntly: “You have to believe with the Socialist Party that the worst is always to come.” After a summer marked by open feuding by several candidates for party leader, he wrote, the party “could not imagine a more execrable ending — an unfinished election, followed by accusations of fraud.”
The weekly newspaper Journal du Dimanche wondered whether the “s” in the party’s acronym stood for “suicidal” rather than “Socialist,” and the front-page headline shouted: “So Much Hatred!” The paper suggested the party could split, while the front page of Le Parisien showed the party’s rose symbol cut in two, with the headline: “The Rift.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/world/europe/24france.html?hp