Mary Dejevsky: Will France's Socialists learn from Britain?

There could be a classic contest between traditionalists and modernisers

The Young Socialists' "summer university", held annually at La Rochelle, shows the French Left at its glorious best and its most self-destructive worst.

Its best face is the egalitarian efficiency with which it can organise a four-course sit-down lunch for several hundred people, with the main course served hot, the cheese just right and everyone talking cheerfully to everyone else.

Its worst face is the bitchy self-absorption into which the gathering descends at every other time of day. The "summer university" illustrates the limitless capacity of France's Socialists - young and old - to ruin their electoral chances, just as every other indicator would suggest that they should logically be on the rise.

Eleven years ago Lionel Jospin won the party's presidential nomination after weeks of bitter in-fighting in the wake of, yes, a party-funding scandal. M Jospin's sombre Protestant probity put him on the ballot; but it could not make him into a campaigner. France was seduced by the more obviously Gallic charms of Jacques Chirac.

At the last presidential election, in 2002, M Jospin disastrously failed to qualify for the run-off, defeated by a combination of his own hesitant campaigning (again), the party's complacency and a general French unease with the world. This time around, with the presidential election only eight months away, France's Socialists seem yet again to have started their campaign as they mean to go on. La Rochelle was an opportunity to show unity of purpose and hunger for power. It might also have been the occasion for an elegant passing of the baton to a new generation. What better forum for a public act of party renewal than the last "summer university" before the campaign?

Of course, this is not what happened. M Jospin turned up, all emotional for once, seeking to tap into his own and his party's guilt for the previous debacle. He may have been throwing his hat into the ring for the nomination; as ever, though, he was disinclined to reveal his ambition. His pitch was about fidelity - to the party's left-wing soul.

But it was also about Ségolène Royal, 14 years his junior, an ebullient moderniser in the Blair mould, who has fewer inhibitions than M. Jospin about political ambition. Ms Royal has been putting herself about for several months, setting up the perfect presidential match with Nicolas Sarkozy, her peer in self-promotion on the modernising right.

The nomination process will be complicated on both sides of the political divide. But on the left, it will be doubly so, for what might be described delicately as "personal reasons". Ms Royal's partner for the past umpteen years and the father of her children is none other than the party's first secretary, François Hollande. To complete the infernal triangle, M Hollande is, or was, reputed to harbour presidential aspirations of his own.

The Young Socialists' gathering did nothing to illuminate the way ahead for the French Left. If anything, it obscured things further. Having split over the European constitution, the party is now divided at least in two, and possibly more. It is hard to see how it can avoid debilitating itself further in the weeks to come.

The rivalries are complex because they are personal as well as ideological. But the two go together, just as they did when Tony Blair set about making the Labour Party electable. Ambitious themselves, modernisers know how to appeal to aspirational voters. They tend to know, too, the value of presentation. They make themselves look as sharp and contemporary as they would like their party to be. They know about "people skills". They take advice: they trust to pollsters and consultants, rather than principle and instinct. And they set out to win, their unimpeachable rationale being that they can do nothing without first gaining power.

A contest that pitted M. Jospin against Ms Royal for the party's presidential nomination would make for a classic contest between traditionalists and modernisers. The warm reception M. Jospin received at La Rochelle suggests which way France's Socialists would go if they voted from the heart. The bigger question is whether they want to win the presidency enough to nominate a moderniser.

And here the answer may not just be different from the one the British Labour Party grudgingly gave Mr Blair. It may also be informed by the British experience. To Ms Royal and her entourage, Blair's Britain has been the social and economic "third-way" success that they believe France could become. With French and British growth rates perhaps changing places and Britain in the international dog-house over Iraq, the appeal of Blairism may not be all it was. In politics, as in so much else, France and Britain somehow seem fated to remain out of sync.