PARIS: The leftwing coalition was jubilant. The right-of-centre government had been defeated, the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, humiliated and the already weakened president, Jacques Chirac, given another damaging kick while he was down.

The contrat premieère embauche, or first employment contract, seen by the right as a solution to rampant youth unemployment and by the left as exploitation of the young, was dead. What better time for the opposition, in this case the Parti Socialiste (PS), to deliver a final, fatal blow to an administration in crisis.

But as the demonstrators went home and the French left from the Trotskyist Lutte Ouvrieère and Communist party to the Greens — unified for once in opposition to the new labour law — rejoiced, the PS failed to throw any kind of coup de grace.

All party leader François Holland would say was the demonstrators’ concerns were ‘at the heart of our project’.

Other socialist luminaries have temporised repeating variations on the phrase: “We’re listening to the French people,” an idea Pascal Virot, Libération’s senior political correspondent, says is neither original nor helpful.

“Where is the left? It’s a good question. I don’t think they have very many concrete proposals,” he told The Guardian.

“Earlier this month the PS spokesman said the party was ‘not in a phase of proposals’ and that it wasn’t in a position to put forward propositions.

“It’s astonishing and for the French, pretty desperate. We have a right that is beaten and a left that cannot do anything about it.

“Normally parties say we can diagnose the problem and here’s our solution. Here all they are saying is that they will listen to people.

“Listening to people may work well in a small village where it’s a question of a street light here or a pavement there, but when it concerns the future of a nation it’s a little more complicated.”

Mr Virot believes the PS is crippled by internal rivalries between at least half a dozen potential candidates for the presidential election next year, including Mr Holland, his partner Ségolène Royal and Mr Fabius.

Jacques Cap de Vielle, professor at the Institut d’&Etudes Politiques, the elite college better known as Sciences-Po and research director at the Centre for the Study of French Political Life, said the problem ran deeper.

“Rivalry between individuals has led to immobility in the Parti Socialiste but sadly the reasons for its retreat are more profound.

“The French left has not taken the baton, it is true, and it seems impotent faced with the globalisation of the economy because it has convinced itself, as others have, that there is ‘no alternative’ — an idea coined by your Mrs Thatcher.”

One of few leading socialists to have come up with a concrete idea is the presidential hopeful Bernard Kouchner, doctor turned founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, former health minister and one time UN administrator of Kosovo.

To counter youth unemployment, running at up to 50 per cent in poor, run down immigrant areas, he proposes offering youngsters a ‘professional contract’ that follows them throughout their careers.

If they lost their job it would be taken over by the state, which would guarantee to pay unemployment benefit (though not necessarily at the current rate of 75-80 per cent of salary) and organise retraining. There would be penalties for those who failed to show willing to work or turned down jobs, and a tinkering with the social charges levied on the lowest paid.

“The details need to be worked out,” he says, but “politicians need to make people take responsibility”.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service