With his professorial looks and wooden rhetoric, Lionel Jospin is nobody's idea of a charismatic candidate. His detractors claim he is boring, strident and stiff as a broom handle; the best his supporters can say about him is that he is earnest, honest and faithful to Socialist ideals. Yet the onetime economics teacher and former Education Minister pulled off a small miracle last week: within two days of winning the Socialist Party's presidential nomination, he saw his poll ratings rise four points. The modest increase was the first sign that the beleaguered Socialists might actually survive into the second and final round of the presidential election on May 7.
That would be a moral victory at best, since political analysts are virtually unanimous in predicting an easy win for Gaullist Prime Minister Edouard Balladur. Jospin's task thus will be to heal, as best he can, the rifts in his divided party and put in a credible performance against Balladur. If he fails on either count--and especially if he is eliminated in the first round on April 23--the party that swept Francois Mitterrand into the Elysee in 1981 and dominated French politics for the better part of a decade could split apart or collapse like an overripe Camembert.
The Socialists' troubles began long before the current campaign. They have been reeling since March 1993, when the conservatives crushed them in legislative elections and forced Mitterrand to share power with a hostile conservative majority. From that point on, the party, which has lost nearly half its members since 1981, has been in free fall. The low point was a dismal 14% showing in last June's European parliamentary elections, which prompted party leader Michel Rocard's resignation and thereby eliminated the most obvious Socialist presidential candidate.
Scrambling to find a new standard bearer, party chieftains turned last fall to outgoing European Commission president Jacques Delors, who was then leading in the opinion polls. But Delors stunned everyone by announcing that he would not run, largely for personal reasons. ``Everyone was ready for Delors,'' says Henri Weber, a party official. ``When he said no, Rocard could have stepped forward again, but he just didn't want to do it. All the undisputed candidates disappeared.''
Into the void stepped three second- echelon pretenders: Jospin, 57; party leader Henri Emmanuelli, 49; and flamboyant former Culture Minister Jack Lang, 55. Though he was the most popular, Lang bowed out at the last minute, leaving the austere Jospin to fight it out with the more hard-line, proletarian Emmanuelli.
With no fundamental policy differences between the candidates, the contest boiled down to one of personal and factional rivalries. Jospin appealed to the civil servants who make up an important part of the party's base; he also enjoyed the support of Rocardians, Delorists and others who hope to ``renovate'' the party by replacing its class-based ideology with a more modern, social democratic approach. The beetle-browed Emmanuelli, with his old-style leftist rhetoric, was more attractive to working-class voters and had the support of most party stalwarts, including former Prime Minister and longtime Jospin enemy Laurent Fabius. Emmanuelli's hold on the party machinery was so strong that many observers thought he had a lock on the nomination, even though polls showed him to be the weaker candidate.