The Socialist Party held its congress and confirmed its paralysis. Olivier Faure, the outgoing leader, managed to hold on to his post, but just barely, against challenger Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, after Boris Vallaud, who finished third in the first round, threw his support to Faure. The extremely close result apparently dissuaded Carole Delga, the president of Occitanie, from bolting the party, as she had threatened to do if Faure was re-elected.
But that is about the only good news to emerge from this botched opportunity. The much hoped-for renewal of the party is nowhere in sight. The contest turned on disputes about the past–the problematic and intermittent alliance with La France Insoumise, among other things–rather than on new directions for the future. The question of how to approach the 2027 presidential election remains unresolved. Will the party back Raphaël Glucksmann’s independent left candidacy? Who knows? A renewed alliance with LFI seems out of the question, in view of Mélenchon’s take-no-prisoners turn. The internal dissension suggests that the PS will have a hard time fielding a viable candidate of its own, whether Faure, Vallaud, Mayer-Rossignol, Delga, or anyone else. Could it endorse, if not Glucksmann, a Ruffin or a Tondelier? The congress answered none of these questions because the leadership contest revolved around personalities rather than ideas. It may be that the new tripartite division of the French political landscape–LFI on the far left, RN on the far right, and the Macroniste-LR marais in the boggy middle–is simply terrain for which the PS has neither a map nor a compass, leaving it stranded in quicksand up to its neck.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the demise of Gaullism. The social-democratic idea is in similar danger of vanishing from the contemporary French spectrum.