Intense backroom dealings follow Socialist triumph

A day after its first place showing in round one of France’s regional elections, the Socialist Party was engaged in a frantic round of backroom horse trading with other leftist parties to extend their dominance ahead of the March 21 second round.

In an interview with a French TV station Monday evening, Claude Bartolone, a Socialist Party member in charge of forming political alliances, announced that the party had reached an agreement with The Greens but did not elaborate.

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But, minutes later, a senior member of The Greens party denied reports of a deal with the Socialists.

In an interview with the AFP news service, Jean-Vincent Placé said the reports were “very premature” and maintained that the announcement by the Socialists “left us perplexed”.

These conflicting reports came ahead of a Tuesday evening deadline to put together a joint list of candidates for next Sunday’s runoff.

The opposition Socialist Party triumphed over the ruling UMP party in Sunday’s first round, winning 29.48 percent of the vote against the UMP’s 26.18 percent. The European Greens garnered 12.47 percent, ahead of the right-wing National Front’s 11.74 percent.

A coalition of the far left, the Left Front, won up to 5.7 percent of votes, bettering the centrist MoDem party, historically France’s third most successful party, which struggled to reach 4.24 percent on Sunday.

The main parties Left: Socialist Party (PS), Greens (Europe Ecologie), Left Front, New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA, far left) Centre: Modem Right: UMP, National Front (FN, far right) Left-wing parties are set to join forces in most regions in the second round, and may court the Modem in a handful of regions. No such alliance is possible on the right, with the National Front likely to hurt the UMP’s chances wherever it reaches the second round.

A second-round ballot will be staged March 21, with only the leading parties going forward to the conclusive vote, which will decide who runs France’s 26 regions.

Since no single party won an outright majority in any region in the first round, the runoff is crucial for France’s leading political parties. Under French law, any party that wins more than 10 percent of the vote in the first round can team up with any party that won more than 5 percent and present a joint list of candidates for the second round.

Sunday’s results were widely viewed as a referendum of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s 34 months in power. However, voter antipathy resulted in a record low turnout for a regional election, with a 53.65 percent abstention rate.