Royal seeks second chance in battle to depose Sarkozy

The struggle to become the Next Big Thing on the French left wing exploded into open warfare at the weekend as the defeated presidential candidate Ségolène Royal announced a bid to become the First Secretary, or leader, of the Socialist Party.

On Thursday, the Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, who is likely to be her main rival, will publish a book called De l'Audace! (Courage!), setting out his political philosophy and ambitions. With six months to go before the Socialists choose their new leader at a conference in Reims, the pair have, in effect, joined battle for the right to be both the party chief and the candidate-elect for the presidential elections in 2012.

Mme Royal, 54, has been bounced into an early declaration by the rising popularity of the gruff, moderate, competent mayor. Although his open homosexuality is regarded as a serious handicap by some political analysts, M. Delanoe, 57, is running far ahead of Mme Royal in recent national opinion polls.

In party meetings and radio interviews at the weekend, Mme Royal made it clear she would be a candidate to succeed her former partner, François Hollande, as First Secretary of the party in November. "If the party members agree with the ideas we put before them ... if they consider it useful ... then I will accept with joy and determination this wonderful mission to become head of the party," she said.

Her announcement drew immediate fire from the supporters of other potential candidates, including M. Delanoe. They accused her of trying to turn the struggle for the soul of France's main opposition party into a battle of personalities, rather than ideas. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former finance minister, who heads the International Monetary Fund in Washington, also let it be known he regarded himself as the best centre-left candidate to challenge the unpopular President Nicolas Sarkozy in four years' time.

Several other party figures, including the Mayor of Lille, Martine Aubry, and the former Europe minister Pierre Moscovici are also likely to challenge for the leadership in November.

The party leader is not necessarily guaranteed to be presidential candidate in 2012. However, both Mme Royal and M. Delanoë covet the post as a way of shaping the party around their own ideas and ambitions. Mme Royal blames her presidential election defeat partly on her own mistakes and partly on the failure of a much-divided party to rally around its candidate.

Both she and M. Delanoë come from the moderate, reformist wing of the party but they disagree on how to adjust Socialist ideals to the modern world. Mme Royal wants to pursue the mixture of grassroots participation politics and appeals to traditional values on which she fought the 2007 election. M. Delanoe is more in the pragmatic, managerial tradition of his mentor, the former prime minister Lionel Jospin.

The first challenge facing any new Socialist leader will be to prevent the party from collapsing into moderate and idealist, or revolutionary wings. Draft amendments in the party's declared aims, to be discussed in November, would abandon all references to revolutionary change and accept the primacy of managed market economics. This has already been the practice of the party in government for 25 years but never the accepted theory.

A radical wing of the Socialist party is threatening to leave to join forces in a new anti-capitalist party with the popular, young Trotskyist leader, Olivier Besancenot.