A Party at War with Itself

France's center-right government has plenty to worry about, with the economy growing at 1% a year and its euro-zone partners stepping up pressure on Paris to control ballooning budget deficits. But at least the rightists don't have to worry about forceful opposition at home. Since losing the presidential and legislative elections earlier this year, France's Socialist Party has failed to pull together--and indeed seems to be coming apart.

Lately, the Socialists have looked like their own worst enemies. In the past few weeks, three different groups of Socialist deputies, including such heavyweights as former parliamentary finance chairman Henri Emmanuelli, have set up organizations aimed at moving the party toward the left--countering efforts by former Socialist Finance Ministers Laurent Fabius and Dominique Strauss-Kahn to recast the party as centrist and market-friendly. So intense is the infighting that on Oct. 9 the party's official spokesman, Vincent Peillon, joined two other deputies in writing an article for the newspaper Libération, saying the Socialists faced a "crisis of confidence" under François Hollande, their chairman for the past five years. In a clear challenge to the party's free-market wing, the three called on Socialists to "fight more effectively and resolutely against the ferocity of the new capitalism and the excesses of deregulation."