Hollande wins the primaries
The MP for Corrèze will go forward as the Socialist candidate for the presidential elections next year
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CLEAR winner of the Socialist primaries with 57% to Martine Aubry’s 43%, François Hollande will be the party’s candidate as for the presidential elections next year.
The second round vote confirmed various surveys in recent weeks which showed him to be the favourite.
Hollande has proved to be the candidate best able to rally support from different strands of the party, and he is now hoping to appeal to left-wing, and centrist, voters generally. In recent televised debates he has aimed to appear above in-party bickering.
After the first round vote the defeated candidates, including his former partner Ségolène Royal (with whom he has four children), rallied round him. He avoided any harsh responses to barbs from Aubry in the run-up to the second round, giving a diplomatic image.
Speaking to supporters in Paris yesterday he said: “We are open, we are not a clan, a faction, a fixed political tendency. Everyone is welcome to participate in the common task.”
Extending a hand to greens and centrists, he said: “We only have two opponents, the extreme right and the right.”
A good loser, Martine Aubry said, after the result was announced: “François Hollande is our candidate tonight; the primaries have made him more legitimate and stronger; it is now time to pull together.”
She is expected to resume her role as first secretary; though questions have been raised in the ranks of Hollande’s supporters as to whether this will remain appropriate.
Europe 1 quoted his “right-hand man” Francois Le Foll as having said: “The matter of the First Secretary is essential; it’s the executive role in the party; we need a first secretary who allows us to work coherently as we approach the presidential campaign.”
Aubry, meanwhile, has said she is not interested in being prime minister to Hollande if he becomes president, adding she thinks it is better for the prime minister to be the younger of the two.
Following Hollande's selection, leading members of President Sarkozy’s UMP Party criticised Hollande’s “inexperience”, especially on the international stage, while also calling him “prudent” and “very orthodox”, someone “not very audacious or transgressive”.
Hollande has been MP for the department of Corrèze, in the south-centre, since 1997, is a former mayor of Tulle, the capital of the department, and was, from 1997 to 2008, first secretary (leader) of the Socialist Party, the role Martine Aubry has held since then.
