Martine Aubry, a former labor minister who brought France the 35-hour work week, was confirmed as the leader of the Socialist Party on Tuesday after a razor-thin contest with her rival.
The result hands Aubry the task of patching up relations within the party — the main opposition to French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservatives — and restoring a public image battered by the fighting with former Socialist presidential nominee Segolene Royal for the leadership.
“Let us rally, let us unite around a line of the left, but also around an upcoming renewal,” Aubry said after the party’s National Council confirmed her victory.
Friday’s election results at first showed Aubry winning by 42 votes from nearly 135,000 cast by party rank-and-file.
Royal’s supporters claimed irregularities and demanded a re-count. The party carried out a two-day review — only to announce Tuesday that Aubry had won by 102 votes.
The next presidential election is not until 2012, but the infighting gives the Socialists an uphill climb to win support. And elections for the European Parliament await next year, along with regional French elections in 2010.
Royal too urged party unity, but also trumpeted her ability to “convince half — and maybe more than half — of the Socialist Party” in the vote, despite having “all the old party apparatus against us.”
But one faction of her supporters said they would take legal action to block Aubry’s victory. Royal’s lawyer and two other representatives made a formal request in writing for the election results to be thrown out, pointing to the “obvious impossibility” of accurately reviewing the voting process.
Conservatives have repeatedly mocked the Socialists’ woes.
“It is carnage on a grand scale,” Nadine Morano, the junior minister for the family, told reporters at the lower house of parliament.
Aubry represents the Socialists’ left wing while Royal wants to open up to centrists. Aubry will replace Francois Hollande, the former companion of Royal and father of her four children, who has been at the party’s helm for nearly a dozen years.
The victory marks the return of Aubry, the 58-year-old mayor of northern Lille, to the national political scene. She made her name as labor minister from 1997 to 2001.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS