French Socialists rally behind Jospin

With shouts of acclamation and enthusiastic applause, French Socialists yesterday nominated Lionel Jospin, a 57-year-old former education minister, to be their candidate in the coming presidential elections.

Mr Jospin had won a convincing victory over his rival, the 49-year-old Socialist leader Henri Emmanuelli, in a primary contest that had threatened to leave the already splintered party still more divided. But the margin of Mr Jospin's victory - 52,250 votes to Mr Emmanuelli's 27,095 - and the size of the turnout - more than 82,000 of the party's 112,681 registered members voted - left no room for doubt. Mr Emmanuelli had to accept the party choice gracefully. Mr Jospin, for his part, expressed confidence in his former rival's leadership of the party, making clear he did not expect or want him to resign.

The final results of the voting, which took place on Friday night in departement party organisations throughout France, were announced at an extraordinary congress of the party in Paris yesterday. Aside from the modernity of the platform furnishings the congress was a very old-fashioned occasion.

All the speakers addressed the delegates as "Dear Comrades", with the exception of Mr Jospin, who began: "Dear Friends and Comrades." There were many extravagant expressions of party solidarity, and the congress ended with a spontaneous show of fraternalaccord as the party's dignitaries assembled on the platform behind Mr Jospin to a spirited (recorded) rendering of the Marseillaise.

During the campaign for the nomination, it was Mr Emmanuelli who had been presented by his supporters (mainly in the party bureaucracy) as the candidate most able to unite the party and the left as a whole. Yesterday Mr Jospin seemed keen to address thisperceived weakness. In his victory speech, he referred several times to the unexpectedly high turnout in the "primary". He also singled out four names for special mention.

The first was Francois Mitterrand (Mr Emmanuelli was known during the campaign as the "Mitterrandist"), Mr Emmanuelli himself (as party leader and for the "mutual respect" in which the campaign had been conducted); Michel Rocard, the former prime minister, and Pierre Mauroy, another former prime minister and now Socialist elder statesman.

As well as symbolically presenting himself as a candidate for all strands of the party, Mr Jospin did his best to banish his non-charismatic image with a rousing attack on Edouard Balladur, the Prime Minister who is favourite to win the presidency. As a person, he said, Mr Balladur was a "mystery", but Balladurism, he went on, to applause, was no mystery at all: it stood for immobility and no change.

Mr Jospin gave little detail about policies beyond expressing support for the underprivileged and pledging not to cut social security.

It remains to be seen whether his candidacy will unite the whole non-Communist left, including Bernard Tapie's Radicals and the ecologists, but as the votes were counted, Mr Tapie, who had supported Mr Emmanuelli until then, hinted that he might consideran alliance with Mr Jospin.

An opinion poll released yesterday showed that Mr Jospin might qualify for a final run-off round in France's forthcoming presidential election but would lose in the end to Mr Balladur, Reuter reports. The survey, of 1,005 voters, placed Mr Jospin on 17 per cent, behind Mr Balladur on 30 per cent and Jacques Chirac on 19 per cent.