French Socialists were struggling to save their party from imminent destruction after the inconclusive weekend leadership contest sparked a duel to the death between the two female contenders.

The opposition party’s national council will meet on Tuesday to decide whether to endorse a national ballot of members that gave Martine Aubry, 58, the figurehead of its old guard, a tiny majority over Ségolène Royal, the flamboyant former presidential candidate. Ms Aubry won 50.02 percent against Ms Royal’s 49.98 percent, according to a count that is contested by Ms Royal.

Ms Royal, 55, who is a charismatic heroine to her supporters but loathed by the old guard, is accusing the Aubry camp of cheating and wants a new vote. Vowing to fight to the end, she said she would take the party to court if it refuses.

Attacking one-another on television, Ms Aubry claimed victory while Ms Royal denounced her for claiming power illegitimately. “You are insatiable Martine. You don’t want to recognise my victory,” Ms Royal told her rival in a pre-dawn telephone call.

Party veterans were aghast as the vicious fight between the women and their respective camps raged in public after the Friday night count put Ms Aubry only 42 votes ahead of the 136,000 total. François Hollande, the outgoing leader and Royal’s former companion, appealed for unity for the sake of the party’s existence. Mr Hollande is campaigning against Ms Royal, who is the mother of their four children.

Ms Aubry’s margin veered to-and-fro today as regions reported errors in their counts. The Lille Mayor, whose stolid style resembles that of Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, still came out several dozen votes ahead. But the Royalists are charging outright fraud in Lille, Ms Aubry’s base, and Normandy, the fiefdom of Laurent Fabius, a former Prime Minister who supports her.

The Socialist spectacle was watched with glee by President Sarkozy’s centre-right UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) party. “The Socialist party is bedlam!” said Frédéric Lefebvre, an MP and UMP spokesman, said. “It is... sliced in two, with two camps that don’t respect each other — worse yet, they hate each other.” The bitter Socialist leadership contest is a symptom of the party’s failure to reform itself while in opposition to the executive presidency since the departure of the late François Mitterrand in 1995.

Michel Rocard, a former Socialist Prime Minister, likened his party to a gravely ill hospital patient. “It is suffering a double disease. As well as a leadership crisis, it still does not admit that society has adopted the free market and that we have to make it work.” The leadership duel is unlikely to change this since both women have embraced old-fashioned Marxist dogma to appeal to a membership that wants the party to return to its radical leftwing roots.

But the two women have radically opposed styles and plans for reshaping the party. Ms Aubry wants to keep the old party machine with its collective decision-making. Ms Royal wants to relaunch it as a broad “people’s party” that would be her vehicle for another run at the presidency in 2012.

Whoever wins, the party is likely to remain ungovernable since the camps hold one another in such contempt. Some experts are predicting a schism or collapse of the Socialist party which, though in parliamentary opposition, dominates France’s city and regional councils. “The party is perhaps heading for a crisis from which it will not recover,” said Dominique Reynié, a leading political scientist. “It has become ungovernable, split into two equal parts.”

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