New leader vows to save French Communists from extinction

The French Communist party refuses to change its name, but it has put on a more modern and appealing face.

Yesterday, the sports minister, Marie-George Buffet, became the first woman to lead the party which once dominated the left. She promised to provide a "new momentum" to halt the decline which threatens to reduce the party to electoral insignificance next year.

As national secretary, Ms Buffet follows the late Georges Marchais – a man who continued to toe Moscow's line even when Moscow had abandoned it – and the colourless Robert Hue, who has seen party membership halve since he assumed the leadership in 1994.

Mr Hue will remain chairman and will be the Communist presidential candidate next spring, but it will be Ms Buffet's job to find a more modern voice and image for the party.

After her election by 86 per cent of delegates to a party conference (she was the only candidate), Ms Buffet said: "The Communist party can find a new momentum. We can win back an important place [and] a new audience ... We can deliver hope and the values of a real leftist policy."

The French Communists – the only former Moscow-backed party in Western Europe to preserve the name – are in danger of becoming the third or even fourth power on the left in presidential and parliamentary elections next year. In the 1950s, the party took a quarter of the vote. In recent elections, it has fallen below 10 per cent and Mr Hue is forecast to score only 5 per cent in the first round of the presidential election in April. He is likely to be outscored by both the Greens and the perennial Trotskyist candidate, Arlette Laguiller.

By joining coalitions with the Socialists (including the present government) but refusing to abandon their name or ideology, the Communists have had the worst of both worlds. They have offended traditionalists and modernists.

Ms Buffet has created a more contemporary, personal image. She has pioneered legal curbs on drugs in sports and criticised the "monstrous blindness" of her party's failure to criticise Soviet oppression.

However, she is often indistinguishable in her politics from her Socialist colleagues and her opponents fear she will lead the party into a form of social democracy.