Socialist Party

The Socialist Party ( , PS) is a French centre-left and social-democratic political party. It holds pro-European views. The PS was for decades the largest party of the "French Left" and used to be one of the two major political parties in the French Fifth Republic, along with The Republicans. It replaced the earlier French Section of the Workers' International in 1969 and is currently led by First Secretary Olivier Faure. The PS is a member of the Party of European Socialists, Progressive Alliance and Socialist International. The PS first won power in 1981, when its candidate François Mitterrand was elected president of France in the 1981 presidential election. Under Mitterrand, the party achieved a governing majority in the National Assembly from 1981 to 1986 and again from 1988 to 1993. PS leader Lionel Jospin lost his bid to succeed Mitterrand as president in the 1995 presidential election against Rally for the Republic leader Jacques Chirac, but he became prime minister in a cohabitation government after the 1997 legislative election, a position Jospin held until 2002, when he was again defeated in the 2002 presidential election. Ségolène Royal, the party's candidate for the 2007 presidential election, was defeated by conservative UMP candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. The PS won most of regional and local elections and for the first time in more than fifty years it won control of the Senate in the 2011 Senate election. On 6 May 2012, François Hollande, the first secretary of the party from 1997 to 2008, was elected president and the next month the party won a majority in the 2012 legislative election. During his term, Hollande battled with high unemployment, multiple Jihadi terrorist attacks, poor opinion ratings and a splinter group of left-wing Socialist MPs known as frondeurs (rebels). On 1 December 2016, Hollande declined to seek re-election and the PS subsequently organized a presidential primary. Left-wing Benoit Hamon was designated as the Socialist candidate after defeating former Prime Minister Manuel Valls. Facing the emergence of centrist Emmanuel Macron and left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Hamon failed to re-establish the PS leadership on the centre-left and finished 5th in the 2017 presidential election, gathering only 6.36 percent of the votes.