Vote for Sarkozy successor crumbles
20 Nov 2012 12:27 AM GMT
The battle to succeed Nicolas Sarkozy at the helm of France's right-wing opposition UMP party turned into a shambles on Monday, with both candidates claiming victory amid accusations of vote-rigging.
Jean-Francois Cope, the party's populist secretary-general, declared to cheering supporters after voting closed late on Sunday that he was the victor, but ex-prime minister Francois Fillon announced just minutes later that he had won.
Cope repeated his claim on breakfast television on on Monday, as Fillon supporters took to the airwaves to insist their man had triumphed in the vote that came six months after Sarkozy's presidential election defeat to the Socialist Francois Hollande.
Both camps claimed there had been irregularities - and even some cheating - in voting in several areas and it was unclear how long it would take the electoral commission to check the ballots and announce a winner. The public slanging match - reminiscent of the bitter in-fighting that for years dogged the Socialist party - reached such a pitch that UMP party heavyweight Alain Juppe, who was Sarkozy's foreign minister, called on the candidates to put a stop to their supporters' ‘invectives’. ‘What I feared has happened,’ he wrote on his blog. ‘The movement has emerged divided and thus weakened by this excessive confrontation,’ he said.
Jean-Francois Cope, the party's populist secretary-general, declared to cheering supporters after voting closed late on Sunday that he was the victor, but ex-prime minister Francois Fillon announced just minutes later that he had won.
Cope repeated his claim on breakfast television on on Monday, as Fillon supporters took to the airwaves to insist their man had triumphed in the vote that came six months after Sarkozy's presidential election defeat to the Socialist Francois Hollande.
Both camps claimed there had been irregularities - and even some cheating - in voting in several areas and it was unclear how long it would take the electoral commission to check the ballots and announce a winner. The public slanging match - reminiscent of the bitter in-fighting that for years dogged the Socialist party - reached such a pitch that UMP party heavyweight Alain Juppe, who was Sarkozy's foreign minister, called on the candidates to put a stop to their supporters' ‘invectives’. ‘What I feared has happened,’ he wrote on his blog. ‘The movement has emerged divided and thus weakened by this excessive confrontation,’ he said.
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