Election defeat exposes strategy split of France's 'power couple'

Defeat in the presidential election threatens to splinter the French Socialist party, starting with its most celebrated "power couple".

The vanquished candidate, Ségolène Royal and her partner, the Socialist leader, François Hollande, are in scarcely veiled conflict over the future of the party. France 2 television snatched telling footage of the couple having a "frank discussion" in the Socialist party headquarters after Sunday's defeat. Mme Royal had just made a concession speech in which she announced that she was "assuming her responsibility" to "deepen the modernisation" of the French left. M. Hollande had just told a television interviewer that his "wife" had made "mistakes" during her campaign and had not been precise enough in her proposals.

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Officially, Mme Royal and M. Hollande - and other party leaders - have since put their differences aside and will present a united front for the parliamentary elections on 10 and 17 June. Behind the façade, the couple, who have four children, are said to be deeply divided over the future strategy of the party and Mme Royal's ambitions to become its de facto leader.

Despite her comprehensive defeat, Mme Royal, 53, believes that she should become a kind of president-in-waiting and leader of the opposition. Party officials say she points to the example of her former boss and mentor, François Mitterrand, who lost the 1974 presidential election to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing but bounced back to win in 1981.

One party official said: "She believes that [the centre-right president-elect Nicolas] Sarkozy can be ejected after one term, as Giscard was, but only if there is a strong and long-established alternative president. In other words, herself." The problem is that M. Mitterrand was the first secretary of the Parti Socialiste, its founder and its undisputed leader. The first secretary is now M. Hollande - Mme Royal's partner for the past 26 years. He, like M. Mitterrand, is a skilled operator of the party machinery. Mme Royal is - and prides herself on being - a comparative outsider. M. Hollande's position is under threat from right and left-leaning Socialist barons. He is unconvinced that his partner can unite his notoriously fractious party better than he can.

He is also opposed to her strategy of making alliances with the centrist leader, François Bayrou - even though there does not seem to be anywhere else for the Socialists to go.

In the meantime, the two Socialist "elephants" - or established party barons - who were defeated by Mme Royal in the primary season last autumn are waiting for their chance to charge. The former prime minister, Laurent Fabius, wants to pull the party towards a kind of Eurosceptic "old socialist" fundamentalism, in alliance with France's profusion of hard-left parties. The problem is that the radical left parties are numerous but their voters are not. In the first round of this year's election, the combined French left scored only 36.3 per cent - its lowest ever total.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former finance minister, wants to rebuild the Parti Socialiste as a market-friendly social democratic party - along the lines of New Labour. He also envisages alliances with M. Bayrou's proposed new party of the centre, due to be launched tomorrow.

The problem is that M. Bayrou is having difficulty in getting this party off the ground. Almost all his 39 deputies have voted for personal survival in the June parliamentary elections and indicated that they will support a "centrist pole" of M. Sarkozy's centre-right party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP).

A small crowd of anti-Sarkozy far-left demonstrators scuffled with police and smashed car windows and store fronts in and around the Place de la Bastille in Paris again on Monday night.