It's time for a leftist renaissance in response to the world economic crisis, the new leader of France's opposition Socialists said Saturday.
"The Socialists' time has returned," Martine Aubry said at a key party gathering, taking aim at conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy, rising social tensions and capitalism's failures.
Aubry's once-powerful party is not in any shape to lead a leftist rebirth, however. Internal ideological rifts and personal rivalries have sapped the Socialists recently, and Aubry's backers exchanged shouts and barbs Saturday with those of former presidential candidate Segolene Royal.
Aubry urged the splintered party to regroup and fight harder against Sarkozy, who has borrowed from the Socialists' rhetoric in recent months in criticizing unfettered financial markets and pushing government bailouts for struggling industries.
She hewed to a traditionalist leftist line in Saturday's speech, praising social democratic European governments of the last century and ruing the legacy of the Reagan and Thatcher years on today's world economy.
"After 30 years of ultraliberalism ... it is up to us to write the next 30 years," Aubry said.
She urged a Europe-wide "renaissance" of the left and pledged to create a special body within the French Socialist Party to find "responses to the economic and social crisis."
Aubry was elected French Socialist chief in a bitter vote last month, beating Royal by just 102 votes.
Royal says the party needs an overhaul and to shift more toward the center as some other European Socialists have in recent years.
Aubry, meanwhile, championed a new text on the party's direction for the next three years that says the Socialists should be "anchored on the left" and shun alliances with centrists.
Saturday's meeting in Paris brought together the party's 306-member National Council, a sort of internal parliament that voted on Aubry's platform and her "Cabinet" of 38 advisers.
Royal did not show up. Though sidelined for now, she already is talking about the 2012 presidential elections.
The next electoral test for the party comes in June with European parliamentary elections.
