Seldom have public events seemed so personal in France’s bitterly fractured Socialist camp where Ségolène Royal, the failed presidential candidate, was trying to bond with a young hardliner yesterday to take control of the party from her humiliated former lover.

François Hollande, secretary-general of the Socialists for the past 11 years, must give up the post next weekend in the wake of a congress in Reims that was likened to a sack of vipers. He is determined not to cede power to Royal, 55, who announced last year that she was leaving him because he had had an affair with a political journalist.

Hollande had desperately wanted to run against Nicolas Sarkozy, the centre-right candidate who won the 2007 presidential contest. Instead the party selected Royal, the charismatic mother of four of Hollande’s children, and he has never forgiven her.

He had hoped to get even by promoting as his replacement Bertrand Delanoë, the chain-smoking gay mayor of Paris. However, in Thursday’s voting for a series of manifestos presented by aspiring candidates, Delanoë trailed behind Royal.

This coincided with the appearance in a glossy magazine of pictures of Royal strolling in Paris with Bruno Gaccio, 50, the dashing creator of a satirical television puppet show that lampoons politicians. He is “a true masculine presence” and the new man in her life.

All the more mortifying for jowly, bespectacled Hollande – nicknamed Flanby after a brand of pudding – were suggestions that his support for Delanoë had damaged the mayor’s chances.

“His backing . . . helped to identify Mr Delanoë with the outgoing leader and with his legacy, which . . . has often been called into question,” said Le Monde, bible of the intellectual elite. “It is not the simplest solution,” was how Hollande summed up his former companion’s first victory on the path to taking control of the party.

Royal, who has campaigned on promises of “renewal”, was trying to forge an alliance with Benoit Hamon, who represents the party’s far left and whose motion scored 20% of the votes on Thursday. Yet Hamon, a fervent believer in the now discredited 35-hour working week, may have more in common with its champion, Martine Aubry, than with Royal, whose position appears erratic.

An alliance between Aubry, Hamon and Delanoë is regarded as unlikely. The Paris mayor blotted his copybook in the eyes of the left when he made the mistake of describing himself as a “free-market advocate”.

An Aubry-Royal partnership seems even more unlikely, given the Siberian chill that has frosted relations between the two women: Royal has never forgiven Aubry for sniping at her when she was running for president.

Her best chance of success, most analysts have agreed, was not to demand the post of secretary-general for herself, but to offer it to Hamon. In a clear dig at Aubry and Delanoë, who are both 58, she has been talking about the need to hand over the torch to a new generation – meaning the 41-year-old Hamon.

What Royal wants above all is the nomination to run as the party’s presidential candidate again in 2012, when she hopes for revenge against Sarkozy. Her most serious challenger for that prize might be Dominique Strauss-Kahn,managing director of the International Monetary Fund, which censured him last month for a “serious error of judgment” over an affair with an employee. This did him less harm in France than in America.

Yet the Socialists have a huge mountain to climb if they are to pose a credible threat to “super Sarko”, whose approval rating, after a disastrous drop early this year, has soared with his statesmanlike performance at the helm of the rotating presidency of the European Union.

He is seen as a safe pair of hands amid the global turmoil.

Royal, by contrast, seems bitter about her party’s lack of support for her presidential effort. She has accused Sarkozy’s government of intimidating her, complaining of various break-ins at her flat in Paris. Some accused her of having run for president to spite Hollande over his infidelities. He, in turn, was often dismissive of her presidential campaign, once claiming that he would have been the more “legitimate” candidate.

Political analysts believe that he has still not abandoned his presidential obsession. According to some of them, on the eve of his return to life as a backbench MP he was plotting to challenge Royal and Strauss-Kahn for the Socialist presidential nomination in 2012.

Royal yesterday struck a conciliatory tone towards the other candidates for the party’s leadership. “We must look for an alliance; I’ll be on the phone to all of them,” she said, with reference to Delanoë and Aubry, as well as Hamon, adding that unity was more important than individual ambition. “We must assemble together all of our talents.”

Closer magazine claimed to have unlocked the secret of a more serene-looking Royal. “She is no longer alone in facing the tribulations of the life of a female politician,” it said. “She has found in Bruno Gaccio an understanding ear and an unfailing support.”

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