Socialist Party (France)

Socialist Party (France)

Coordinates: 48°51′35.35″N 2°19′22.44″E / 48.8598194°N 2.3229°E / 48.8598194; 2.3229

The Socialist Party (French: Parti socialiste, PS; ) is a social-democratic political party in France and the largest party of the French centre-left. The PS is one of the two major contemporary political parties in France, along with the centre-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP). The party replaced the earlier French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) in 1969, and is currently led by First Secretary Harlem Désir. The PS is a member of the Party of European Socialists (PES) and the Socialist International (SI).

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 became prime minister in a cohabitation government after the 1997 parliamentary elections, a position Jospin held until 2002, when he was again defeated in the presidential election.

In 2007, the party's candidate for the 2007 presidential election, Ségolène Royal, was defeated by conservative UMP candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. Then, the Socialist party won most of regional and local elections and it won control of the Senate in 2011 for the first time in more than fifty years. On 6 May 2012, François Hollande, the First Secretary of the Socialist Party from 1997 to 2008, has been elected President of France, and the next month, the party won the majority in the National Assembly.

The PS also formed several figures who acted or have acted at the international level: Jacques Delors, who was the eighth President of the European Commission from 1985 to 1994 and the first person to serve three terms in that office, was from the Socialist Party, as well as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund from 2007 to 2011, and Pascal Lamy, who has been Director-General of the World Trade Organization since 2005.