The battle to succeed Nicolas Sarkozy at the helm of France’s right-wing opposition UMP party turned into a shambles today, 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 yesterday 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 today, 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. Throughout the campaign, it has been less a question of the future of the UMP and more about the two candidates’ obsession with 2017,” he said.
That is the date of the next presidential election.
But whoever emerges as the new leader is not certain to be the party’s candidate then as Sarkozy —— whom polls say most UMP supporters want to have another tilt at the presidency —— has not ruled out a return to politics.
Both Fillon, 58, and Cope, ten years his junior, are advocates of free market policies and economic reform. But they differ on social issues, with Cope sharing Sarkozy’s tough-talking approach on immigration and the integration of Europe’s largest Muslim community.
Cope aides said he had won 1,000 more votes than his rival in a poll in which more than half of the UMP’s 300,000 members had cast their ballots. Fillon said he was 224 votes ahead.
But the electoral commission suspended the count till 0900 GMT today, with the chairman saying records from 50 per cent of the regions were missing.