Vanquished French left faces ruin in five-way split

One year after their humiliating defeat in the presidential election, the French Socialists are more divided than ever and facing a national conference next month that could split and even destroy them.

Voting starts this weekend on a series of motions on the future direction of the party, which could force the removal of the first secretary, François Hollande, accused by four mutually detesting factions of being centrist and elitist.

M. Hollande's supporters – including almost all the leading figures in the previous French government – fear more than 50 per cent of party members may vote for motions calling for the party to steer sharply to the left at its congress in Dijon.

If this happens, M. Hollande may be forced out of the de facto leadership of the French left – vacated by the former prime minister Lionel Jospin after he was eliminated in the first round of the presidential election 12 months ago this week. This would leave the Socialists split five ways and facing the possible break-up of the core party of the centre-left painstakingly built by the late François Mitterrand in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Leading Socialists, ranging from the former finance ministers Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius to the former employment minister Martine Aubry, have appealed to party members to keep their nerve and ignore appeals for dramatic turnings to the left.

All three would hope to emerge as leader if M. Hollande fell. None of them is confident of reuniting the party, if it scatters in Dijon.

Other voices in the party blame last year's defeat on the centrist policies pursued by M. Jospin in his five years as Prime Minister. They also say they want to halt the party's drift away from the grass roots and working class towards what they see as Parisian and middle-class attitudes.

Party members must choose between five rival motions – inviting precisely the kind of scattering of the socialist vote that brought down M. Jospin last year.

M. Hollande is calling on party members to unite behind an official motion that calls for the creation of a "broad" socialist party, "clearly committed to policies of the left". These are listed as the rebuilding of the 35-hour working week and combating racial and sexual discrimination.

The main opposition comes from the traditional, hard left campaigning as le Nouveau Monde (the New World) and from a potential breakaway party known as the New Socialist Party, campaigning against globalisation and for a new French constitution.

The first faction is led by Henri Emmanuelli, a former party treasurer convicted of fraudulently raising campaign money in the 1990s. He attacks the "socio-liberal" policies of the Jospin government and calls for the Socialist Party to move its "centre of gravity further to the left."

The New Socialist Party – led by Vincent Peillon and Arnaud Montebourg – wants to impose restrictions on multinational companies, to impose higher taxes on income and capital and to abolish the directly elected French presidency. There are in addition two other rival but similar factions.