Paris: Last year an American socialist on a long stay in France ambled almost daily past the Socialist Party (PS) headquarters of Paris’s fourth arrondissement. He thought to stop in. “What are local Socialist politics like?” he wondered. After all, he came from the United States, where, unlike France, avowed socialists rarely come close to winning elections.

But there was a problem. The PS office was always closed.

Finally, he saw a notice indicating when it was open—one day a week for a half hour. This was a time of massive demonstrations against labor legislation proposed by the conservative government of President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. The PS is the major opposition party, thousands of new members joined it during the protests, yet it never seemed to situate itself in this broad opposition movement. A year later, Nicolas Sarkozy, of the conservative Union for a Popular Majority (UMP), defeated Socialist Ségolène Royal in p...

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FOOTNOTES:

• [1] Thanks to Martin Schain for pointing this out and for valuable criticisms of an early draft of this article.
• [2] But if Strauss-Kahn becomes a successful reformer at the IMF, his return to PS leadership becomes plausible and might even position him to challenge Sarkozy in the next presidential race.