Royal upset in battle to lead French Socialist party

Sometimes it can pay to be a maverick and not toe the party line, as last year's defeated Socialist party candidate in the French presidential election, Ségolène Royal, proved on Thursday.

Against all expectations, party activists here have given the thumbs up to Royal's programme of reform for the future of the party.

And her success has rather thrown a spanner in the works ahead of next weekend's conference to choose a new leader.

On Thursday, party activists around the country voted on whose "vision" for the future they liked most.

It was step one in a rather protracted process that will end with the election of a new party leader - again only by members - next weekend in the northern French city of Rheims.

Although nobody secured a majority in yesterday's vote, Royal's programme garnered 29 per cent, beating one from Bertrand Delanoë, the current mayor of Paris, and another programme from Martine Aubry into second place. They both mustered around 25 per cent each.

Royal's programme includes reaching out to the grass roots and broadening the party's appeal - perhaps by once again making overtures to François Bayrou's centre MoDem party.

She tried that once before during last year's presidential election, but Bayrou - then a member of the centre-right Union pour la Démocratie Française (Union for French Democracy,UDF) - turned her down.

Delanoë and Aubry - the architect of this country's 35-hour working week, both reject any alliance with a party that isn't "clearly Left".

For the past couple of months Delanoë had seemed far and away the most likely to receive the nod - not only for his programme but also for next weekend's election of a new leader.

So much so that when Royal announced in a television interview last month that she was taking herself out of the running by putting her bid to be leader "on hold", many viewed it as another way of saying she was giving in to the inevitable.

At the time though, she refused to be drawn on the issue of whether she would stand, insisting that first there should be the vote on the party programme, and based on that result she would make a decision. Royal also urged the other candidates to do the same.

Little did anyone realise that her move would have some resonance among the party's grass roots membership.

Least of all perhaps her former partner and current leader of the party, François Hollande, who is standing down after 11 years in the job, and had thrown his weight behind Delanoë.

Prior to Thursday's vote Hollande, safe in the "knowledge" that all opinion polls seems to point towards Delanoë's programme winning, or at worst being challenged only by Aubry's, had even suggested that whichever one "came first" would be a clear signal as to how the party should progress in the run up to the next presidential election and who the candidate would be.

In fact most people within the party and certainly much of the media, had pretty much written off Royal's chances of pulling off a win, and Hollande is now singing quite a different tune and using the fact that nobody secured a clear majority (far from it) to do something of an about turn on where he - and more importantly the party - stands.

"It's not the simplest scenario for the party," he told reporters on Friday morning. "The problem is not the order of (of the programmes) but how to ensure that the programme can get a majority backing within the party."

So what does this mean for the future of the party?

Well first up, it's yet again a clear indication that a party which everyone, including its membership, admits has been in disarray even before Nicolas Sarkozy won the presidential election last year and started cherry-picking some of its most high profile members for jobs in government or international organisations, still has a long way to go before it can hope to show some of that much yearned for unity.

And of course over the next week there's likely to be a fair bit of horse trading in the run-up to the crucial vote in Rheims.

But one thing seems certain. For all of those who had thought Royal had no role to play - they were wrong, and for once, she is proving herself capable of playing a waiting game.

In what can only be seen as an unaccustomed statement from Royal, she opted for the measured approach.

"The result has given me and my programme a legitimacy (within the party) she said on Friday.

"But I don't want to declare myself a candidate for the post of leader until I've spoken to all the others (who had put forward programmes."

Interesting times - well if you follow French politics.