The French Left, meanwhile, has succumbed to ranting and backbiting.
Here's Claude Allègre, former minister of education in the Jospin government: François Hollande, the party's leader, "has taken us for imbeciles". He has preferred to "surround himself with incompetent schemers".
There's also Dominique Strauss-Kahn - the man whose aides tried to keep Paris's popular socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoe off the TV screens on election night so that only "DSK" would appear as the obvious alternative to Segolene Royal. Soon afterwards,
he rushed to declare Hollande the one who carried "the principal responsability" for the party's defeat. "The Socialist Party has been incapable of renewing itself since 2002," the long-time party 'elephant' said accusingly.
Segolene Royal, of course, did significantly better in her presidential run than Jospin did in 2002, when he didnt even get into the second round. She also received the same share of vote as Jospin did in 1995, but at a much higher turnout, meaning she got about two and a half million more votes. Moreover, as a magnificently complicated map in Le Monde of 9 May showed, Royal beat Sarkozy in 65 districts that in the last parliamentary elections had gone to the right, while, vice versa, Sarkozy beat Royal only in 38 districts that had gone to the left. So compared to the last legislative elections Royal improved the Socialist score too.
This is not on the mind of DSK, who had wanted to run for president himself but was soundly defeated by Segolene in the primaries. Overlooking Sego's results, he sighs, "When one arrives at suffering a defeat like the one we've seen, there is obviously a crisis."
It'd started earlier still, of course. The day Le Monde was still publishing intricate election maps, Martine Aubry, socialist mayor of Lille, insisted that "there will be no war of the leaders" in the Socialist Party, before snipping away at the question whether the defeat wasn't a failure of leadership: "We chose our candidate. We knew her and she was consistent with who she is. She chose her style, her priorities, and her ideas, which are sometimes at a discrepancy with some of ours, sometimes in line with society. She was our candidate and we had to respect her."
In case that didnt make her attempt to put Sego in her place clear enough, Aubry continued, "Today, Segolene Royal is clearly one of the persons in charge of the Socialist Party, like others who have expressed themselves. If you agree with saying that the responsability [for the defeat] was not hers, but a collective one, then she also has to accept, and she will, to be around the table with [the rest of] us" about the future course of the party. "Segolene is now one leader among others in the Socialist Party."
Ouch.
Not to worry, the Socialists arent alone in tearing themselves up. UDF presidential candidate Francois Bayrou has created his new Democratic Movement (MoDem), as noted here before, but had to do so without the lions share of the UDF's members of parliament, who massively deserted to Sarkozy's camp.
On the other hand, the MoDem has been
joined by over 20 of the Green Party's officials, as those are leaving their party en masse after their presidential candidate's ignonimous first round score.
The Green Member of European Parliament (and the party's former national secretary) Jean-Luc Bennahmias has gone over. So have the deputy mayor of Paris Danièle Auffray, and the two Paris city councillors Olivier Pagès and Violette Baranda. Like seven other ecologists who were elected into office for the Green Party in the past, they will stand as MoDem candidates in the upcoming parliamentary elections - and are branded "felons" for it in the Greens' HQ.
The hell of it is, I even like Francis.