Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher, has decribed the country’s Socialist party as ‘dead’.
France’s demoralised Socialists have been plunged into deeper gloom after one of the Left’s most emblematic supporters called for the party to be disbanded.

Asked by the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche if he thought the Socialist Party, or PS, was dying, Mr Lévy answered: “No – it is already dead.

“No-one, or nearly no-one, dares to say it. But everyone, or nearly everyone, knows it.”

The PS scored miserably in last month’s European elections – only just ahead of a Green-radical alliance and way behind President Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right UMP party – and is troubled by internal ideological divisions and personality wars.

Mr Lévy, a life-long Socialist voter, said the party was now in the same phase of its history as the Communists in the 1970s “when disintegration loomed and they tried to ward it off with magic words like ‘renovation’ and ‘refoundation’.

“We need to accelerate the process, dissolve [the party], finish as quickly as possible with this great sick body,” he said.

Party insiders are increasingly outspoken in their attacks against their first secretary, Martine Aubry, who last year narrowly won a leadership contest over the former presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal.

The party’s former spokesman, Julien Dray, wrote in his blog on Monday that her nine months in power had been characterised by “impotence, amateurism, and above all an astonishing incapacity to understand what is happening either in the party or in society”.

Bertrand Delanoë, Paris’s popular Socialist mayor, said he stood by the Socialist leader despite the party’s woes, but that the party must end its battle of egos in which “everyone is trying to clinch a personal victory, not a victory for the French people or the ideas of the Left”.