Socialist Party (France)

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. Benoît Hamon, from the left wing of the party, 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. The party then lost the majority of its MPs in the 2017 legislative election, securing just 26 seats, becoming the fourth-biggest group in the National Assembly.

Several figures who acted at the international level have also been members of the PS, including Jacques Delors, who was the president of the European Commission from 1985 to 1994 and the first person to serve three terms in that office; Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was the managing director of the International Monetary Fund from 2007 to 2011; and Pascal Lamy, who was Director-General of the World Trade Organization from 2005 to 2013. Party membership has declined precipitously, standing at 22,000 members in 2021, down from 42,300 in 2016, 60,000 in 2014 and 173,486 members in 2012. However, before the start of the 2023 Marseille Congress, the party announced that it had more than 41,000 members, almost double that of the previous count announced during the 2021 Villeurbanne Congress. At the end of July 2023, the Socialist Party claimed 45,000 members. Provided by Wikipedia