PARIS - President, Jacques Chirac's Rally for the Republic (RPR) used to promise voters that it would do for France what it had done for Paris, writes Lara Marlowe. But now the Socialist party has turned the RPR's own slogan against it: "Don't let them run France the way they ran Paris", the party's leader, Mr Lionel Jospin, told 5,000 young people at a rally.
Taking his cue from Mr Jospin, the head of the Socialists' Paris council, Mr Bertrand Delanoe, yesterday held a press conference to present a black book on RPR corruption in Paris. "A system developed through shocking practices of shady financing, bribes, property rackets," Mr Delanoe said. "Parisians of all political persuasions feel sickened by such methods, worthy of a banana republic."