France's Kouchner "fed up" with Socialist party

By Staff
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Google Oneindia News

PARIS, Aug 26 (Reuters) French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said today he was fed up with sniping from his Socialist party since he joined Nicolas Sarkozy's centre-right government.

In an interview with Le Parisien newspaper, Kouchner said the Socialists had lost touch with the pace of change in French society and were dominated by arrogant ''monomaniacs''.

''We need a strong left, an alternative, but I'm fed up with the permanent criticism and I don't say that because I'm in the government,'' Kouchner was quoted as saying.

''I'm fed up with the false, petty civil war.'' Socialist leaders said in May, after Kouchner joined Sarkozy's government, that they planned to expel him from the party.

They have since kept up an attack on French foreign policy, criticising the role played by Sarkozy's wife in freeing six foreign medics imprisoned in Libya and Kouchner for visiting Iraq just days after Sarkozy met US President George W Bush.

Kouchner's comments come a week before the Socialist party meets in La Rochelle, western France, to try and overcome personal and ideological divisions that have surfaced since the presidential election, the party's third straight defeat.

''The state of the Socialist party (PS) makes me sad,'' said Kouchner. ''But it probably needs to go through this bitter and not very exhilarating phase in order for a more responsible Left to emerge. I wish them luck.'' Defeated presidential candidate Segolene Royal reasserted her claim to leadership of the Socialists yesterday in her first speech in two months.

''We will be able to succeed in renewing the Socialist party and a certain number of its ideas if we succeed also in renewing the way we behave on a day to day basis,'' she told supporters, urging an end to the infighting that has rumbled all summer.

REUTERS KK PM1730

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