France’s socialist party is failing to learn from its mistakes

France’s socialist party are to be congratulated for pulling off the remarkable feat of selecting as their next leader a man who makes François Hollande look dashing. As one French newspaper said of Olivier Faure, he’s “a man of consensus at the head of a moribund socialist party”.

Faure, 49, won’t be officially anointed the first secretary of the socialist party until their congress next month, but the job is his now that his only challenger, Stéphane Le Foll, withdrew from the leadership race on Friday.

The word ‘apparatchik’ could have been invented for Faure, a man whose Wikipedia page should be required reading for all insomniacs. It traces his tedious trail from joining the socialist party at the age of 16, to becoming secretary general of a socialist youth wing seven years later, to working in various capacities for Martine Aubry, Hollande and Jean-Marc Ayrault, a triumvirate of socialists whose influence over the party in recent decades is largely responsible for the catastrophic result in last year’s presidential election when only six per cent of the French people voted for their candidate, Benoît Hamon.