PARIS - France's socialist favorite Segolene Royal has moved a step closer to
becoming the country's first ever woman president after she won a resounding
victory in a party primary over two more experienced rivals.
In a ballot of some 220,000 Socialist Party (PS) members, Royal won slightly
over 60 percent, well over the fifty percent of votes needed to avoid a second
round in the primary against her two rivals, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent
Fabius.
Segolene Royal reacts after the first
results of the primary held by France's opposition Socialist Party to
choose a candidate for the April 2007 presidential election, in Melle,
center France. [AFP]
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"There will be only one round
of voting and Segolene Royal will be the candidate of the Socialist Party in
2007," said PS election official Stephane Le Foll.
Strauss-Kahn took 20.8 percent of the vote and Fabius 18.5 percent, according
to complete results.
Party officials said turnout was high, at just above 82 percent.
Royal, who voted Thursday afternoon in the western town of Melle,
acknowledged victory shortly before midnight.
"I would like to express all the happiness I am feeling. I am living this
moment of happiness with intensity," she said.
"Together we are going to build something extraordinary. France is going to
write a new page of its history. The country wants change. I want to embody that
change," she said.
The scale of the success gave a major early boost for Royal's campaign for
the April elections, where polls she has a good chance of beating the likely
right-wing contender Nicolas Sarkozy.
Aides of her two opponents conceded victory and called on all party members
to come together to defeat the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP).
"When there is a result like this, the responsibility of socialists is to
recognise the result, to recognise Segolene Royal's designation and to announce
that the task of all socialists now is to rally together to beat the right,"
said Fabius's campaign director Claude Bartolone.
"This evening it is confirmed. Segolene has been chosen on the first round.
We wish her good luck and a fair wind. She wanted all means to take on Sarkozy.
She has them," said Jean-Christophe Cambadelis, an aide to Strauss-Kahn.
The 53 year-old head of the Poitou-Charentes regional council, Royal has
captured a popular mood in France by posing as an anti-establishment outsider
and making policy pronouncements that often challenge her own party's orthodoxy.
Accused by opponents of playing on her glamorous image and lacking political
depth, she more than held her own during a month of primary campaigning which
included six debates with her two rivals.
Her clear victory was helped by some 70,000 new party recruits, who were
attracted by her growing popularity and see a Royal candidacy as the surest way
of defeating Sarkozy at the election.
In her last rallies she called on party members to turn out in force,
describing the vote as "the first round of the presidential election against the
right" and likening the atmosphere to the optimism surrounding Francois
Mitterrand's election in 1981.
Of her two opponents in the primary, Fabius -- a 60 year-old former prime
minister -- represented the left of the party, while Strauss-Kahn, 57, a former
finance minister, posed as the candidate of moderate pragmatism.
A mother of four and partner of the PS leader Francois Hollande, Royal was a
little-known former junior minister when she launched her bid for the presidency
a year ago.
Using an Internet site entitled "Desires for the Future" to promote her idea
of popular democracy and enjoying constant exposure in the media, she overcame
initial scepticism in the political establishment to position herself as a force
for renewal.
Some of her ideas -- such as boot-camps for young delinquents, "popular
juries" to monitor politicians and greater freedom for parents to choose their
childrens' schools -- prompted misgivings on the left, but she said she was
responding to popular demands.
France's election takes place over two rounds on April 22 and May 6, and
polls show that Royal and Sarkozy are neck-and-neck. President Jacques Chirac
has refused to rule out standing for a third term, though opinion surveys
suggest he would have little chance of winning.