Word: socialists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...United Socialist Party (PSUV) did pick up 17 of 22 state governorships, including Chávez's home state of Barinas, on Venezuela's poor llanos, or plains, where the president's brother Adan held off a strong challenge from a breakaway Chávista candidate. The PSUV also took about two-thirds of the total national vote and kept the opposition from winning the seven or eight states it needed to stun Chávez. If the radical, anti-U.S. firebrand showed anything, it's that his red-beret power and popularity are relatively intact...
That France's Socialist Party (PS) has long been divided to the point of dysfunctionality is not exactly a secret. Yet no one thought the flummoxed party was ready to prove itself the Florida of European democracy. Yet that's exactly what happened Saturday, when polling for PS leadership designated a winner with a mere 42-vote lead - immediately provoking accusations of cheating, and calls for a new election. (See video from TIME's visit to the convention for the French Socialist Party...
...obtain any Floridian-style recounts - much less win an entirely new vote. That means Aubry, a former Labor and Social Affairs minister and architect of France's now-defunct 35 hour work-week, becomes the first female leader in PS history. Her objective in that post: constructing a Socialist platform rooted in more traditionally leftist policies to win back voters who flocked to Green and Communist parties after years of the PS's centrist drift. She then hopes to build a coalition of all leftist parties to finally mount a challenge to nearly a decade of unbroken national dominance...
...reality, Aubry, 58, is less the dour, doctrinaire Socialist she's positioned herself to be in contrast to the relaxed pragmatism and image-driven reputation for modernity and change characteristic of Royal. Still, even if Aubry's main differences with Royal, 55, are largely about style rather than political orientation or objective, she's proven to be just as polarizing as her rival. That means the tight result will find Aubry trying to lead just as many PS members who love her as those who hate her with a passion...
...Perhaps more troubling still, anti-Royal forces often accused the ex-presidential candidate of only wanting the PS leadership job to lock up the party's standard-bearing spot in the 2012 race to challenge President Nicolas Sarkozy. Though beaten narroely for the top Socialist post, Royal shouldn't be expected to knuckle under to Aubry's expectedly tight rule, nor cast off her 2012 presidential ambitions. (See pictures of Sarkozy's trip to London...