PARIS — More than a week after the French center-right opposition party’s leadership election, the two candidates continued to wrangle over the outcome on Monday after an attempt at mediation by a former prime minister ended in acrimony late Sunday and an internal panel continued to investigate allegations of electoral mismanagement and fraud.
The dispute, which has sown acute confusion and embarrassment within the party, the Union for a Popular Movement, even has some calling for intervention by Nicolas Sarkozy — whom the French voted out of the presidency in May, but who is widely believed to be planning an eventual political comeback.
“It’s his turn now,” said Alain Juppé, a former prime minister who failed to broker a compromise Sunday between the right-leaning acting party leader, Jean-François Copé, and François Fillon, who was Mr. Sarkozy’s centrist prime minister. Both claim to have won the party’s election.
Mr. Sarkozy, Mr. Juppé told French radio, “is the only one today who has enough authority to possibly suggest a way out.”
The tight leadership race between Mr. Copé, 48, and Mr. Fillon, 58, is as much a battle for power as for the direction of the U.M.P. after it lost its majority in the Parliament in June. Mr. Copé wants to move the party further to the right to challenge the popularity of the National Front and its leader, Marine Le Pen, while Mr. Fillon wants to move the party back toward its Gaullist, more centrist positions.
Mr. Copé was declared the winner on Nov. 19 — by just 98 votes. But after grudgingly accepting his narrow defeat, Mr. Fillon challenged the result a day later, after it emerged that the final tally of more than 176,000 votes had not included 1,304 ballots cast in three far-flung French territories: New Caledonia and Wallis-et-Futuna in the South Pacific and Mayotte, off the coast of Madagascar. After counting those apparently forgotten votes, Mr. Fillon said that he had actually won by 26 votes and has since refused to concede the race.
Mr. Copé, meanwhile, insists that the official result should stand — and some of his supporters have made not-so-veiled threats to seek an investigation into voting ”irregularities” in several French precincts friendly to Mr. Fillon.
As party luminaries have worked frantically to resolve the impasse, citizens and politicians alike have flocked to social media Web sites to vent their frustration and disbelief.
Many had pinned their hopes for a resolution on a mediation session between the two candidates that was convened late Sunday by Mr. Juppé, the mayor of Bordeaux who served as prime minister under former President Jacques Chirac and helped to found the U.M.P. a decade ago.
But after just 45 minutes meeting with the two sides, Mr. Juppé threw up his hands: “The conditions are not conducive for my mediation,” he posted to his Twitter account. “My mission is finished.”
French media reported that Mr. Sarkozy, who returned Monday from a conference in Shanghai, spent much of the weekend on the phone with several party heavyweights, including Mr. Juppé.
Mr. Sarkozy has also reportedly urged his former prime minister to make a formal appeal to the U.M.P.’s dispute resolution body — something Mr. Fillon has thus far rejected, saying the panel was stacked with Copé loyalists. Instead, Mr. Fillon has threatened to take the matter to court — a step that Luc Chatel, a former minister who supports Mr. Copé, likened to “a nuclear bomb.”
Mr. Sarkozy was to meet with Mr. Fillon for lunch in Paris on Monday. But it was unclear what proposals, if any, might emerge from that encounter.
Claude Guéant, a close aide to Mr. Sarkozy and his former interior minister, would not rule out the possibility that the former president might weigh in publicly on the dispute.
“We cannot continue this dizzying plunge into the abyss,” Mr. Guéant said in a radio interview. “I doubt that he wants to enter the fray,” said Mr. Guéant. “But it’s clear that something needs to happen.”
Meanwhile, others are simply calling for the election to be held again.
Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, another former Sarkozy minister who failed to garner enough endorsements to seek the U.M.P. leadership herself, announced Monday that she had set up an online petition calling for a new election in order to restore the party’s “political legitimacy.”
“The U.M.P. is not committing suicide because of a fight between two would-be leaders,” she told Europe 1 radio. “’The election failed because it was too close to call.”
Rift in French Party Resists Mediation Attempt http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel/p-89EKCgBk8MZdE.gif
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق