Socialist Party

PARIS - The French Socialist Party won a historic majority in Parliament on Sunday, providing recently elected President Francois Hollande with a free hand to govern. The Socialists now control the country's main political institutions, including both houses of Parliament, the majority of regional councils and the political authorities in the most important French cities, giving Hollande and his government the most power the left has ever had. The surge of support provides Hollande with a green light for his election manifesto, which promised to tax the rich, impose greater controls on banks and financial institutions and balance France's economic books.

The Los Angeles headquarters of the Socialist Workers Party is a storefront next to a taqueria on Western Avenue. The concrete patch behind it is ringed by concertina wire. On Saturday afternoon, a man unloaded Air Jordans onto the hood of his Buick Regal around the corner and hawked them to passers-by. Inside the office, Norton Sandler - the party's mayoral candidate - sat at a card table, flanked by two of his supporters. His wife, Barbara, busied herself in the back. The bare room was lined with racks of books from the party's publishing arm, Pathfinder Press, whose roots go back to 1930.

President Sali Berisha resigned and handed power to the Socialists who won June 29 elections. Socialist Party leaders have said their secretary-general, Rexhep Mejdani, will be their choice to replace Berisha, who will remain in parliament. The Socialists' overwhelming election victory came after months of chaos and violence that followed the collapse of high-risk investment schemes. Berisha and his Democratic Party were widely blamed for the economic hardship.

The Republican team of Mitt Romney and Paul D. Ryan is less about the future than it is about nostalgia for a past that many Americans imagine was better -- a time when businessmen were free of government meddling and all citizens, even the poor, old or handicapped, were expected to fend for themselves or scrape by on charity.  From the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, a different, liberal...

For the first time in Japanese politics, a woman has been elected head of a major political party, a vote count revealed Saturday. Takako Doi, 57, was overwhelmingly elected to head the Japan Socialist Party, defeating Tetsu Ueda, 58, by 58,670 votes to 11,748. Her landslide victory came in the wake of the July election setback by Japan's voters that created the greatest crisis the Socialist Party has faced in its 31-year history.

Bulgarian Socialist Party leader Alexander Lilov was reelected to the party chairmanship in a defeat for liberals who sought faster economic reform and a break with the party's authoritarian past. Lilov appealed for party unity and promised to complete the democratic restructuring of the party, formerly the Communist Party.

Socialist Party official Jarallah Omar was shot to death after speaking at an Islamic Reform Party congress in the capital, Sana, said Seif Tayel, another official with the party. An Interior Ministry official identified the assailant as Ali Jarallah. Police said they arrested him at the house of Parliament Speaker Abdullah Hussein Ahmar, head of the Islamic Reform Party. The party denied that Jarallah was a member.

Moving to end a political crisis with its government coalition partner, the Socialist Party in effect ousted Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy from office and said it would nominate his replacement next week. The Socialists said they had accepted Medgyessy's offer to resign, apparently reacting to his threat earlier in the day to step down unless the junior coalition partner -- the Alliance of Free Democrats -- reaffirmed its confidence in him.

Socialist Party leader Bettino Craxi stepped down as expected on Thursday and said he would spend his time defending himself against corruption allegations. "My mandate as (party) secretary now ends and is today formally at your disposition," said Craxi, calling it quits after 16 years and seven months at the party's helm. The former premier called the allegations linking him to Italy's widening kickback and extortion scandal an "unjust aggression" by judges and political enemies.

Spain's ruling Socialist Party suffered setbacks in elections Wednesday for local, regional and European parliamentary representatives, early official returns showed. With 47% of the ballots counted, the Socialist Party of Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez had won 40% of the vote for a loss of eight seats in the European Parliament, dropping from 36 to 27 seats, returns showed. In general elections last June, the Socialists won their second four-year term in office with 44% of the vote.

PARIS - The French Socialist Party won a historic majority in Parliament on Sunday, providing recently elected President Francois Hollande with a free hand to govern. The Socialists now control the country's main political institutions, including both houses of Parliament, the majority of regional councils and the political authorities in the most important French cities, giving Hollande and his government the most power the left has ever had. The surge of support provides Hollande with a green light for his election manifesto, which promised to tax the rich, impose greater controls on banks and financial institutions and balance France's economic books.

PARIS - He calls himself Mr. Normal. But that's only if "normal" means having the chance to become one of France's strongest presidents in recent memory. Francois Hollande, the unassuming politician who won last month's presidential election, is on the verge of cementing that victory by securing a legislative majority. If his Socialists can achieve that feat at the polls Sunday, or at least join up afterward with allies from like-minded parties, Hollande would occupy a commanding position that France's left hasn't enjoyed in a generation.

ATHENS - Greeks braced for another trip to the ballot box next month after weeklong crisis talks aimed at forming a coalition government collapsed Friday. The repeat election will probably take place June 17, senior government and party officials said. The breakdown came after socialist PASOK party leader Evangelos Venizelos failed to persuade Alexis Tsipras and his far-left Syriza party to team up in a coalition government after Sunday's elections gave no party overall control of Parliament.

After weeks of what the French press branded "false suspense," President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday night finally announced what everyone expected: He will seek a second term in office. Sarkozy, 57, said it was unthinkable that he would not want to remain in his post given the "unprecedented crisis in France, Europe and the world. " "It would be like a captain saying at the height of a storm that he was giving up," he said on live television. The announcement came as Sarkozy's Socialist Party rival, Francois Hollande, has pulled farther ahead in opinion polls.

France's sometimes fractious Socialist Party, often seen as the likeliest party to unseat President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012, emerged from its annual conference Sunday with no damaging public divisions yet with few shared answers on how to modernize its economic program to adapt to current fiscal conditions. Despite several recent victories, Sarkozy remains unpopular. Yet the Socialists suffer from an image as a divided clan, and the ongoing European debt crisis and France's growing deficit fears have only made the jobs harder, rendering many of the party's earlier proposals seemingly impossible to fund.

In the space of just six weeks, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has gone through several metamorphoses in the eyes of his compatriots in France. As head of the International Monetary Fund, he had been considered a "Washington exile" in French political circles. Charged with sexually assaulting a New York hotel housekeeper, he became the "Sofitel Accused" and then the "Rikers Island Prisoner. " Today, he has been reincarnated as the "Phoenix of New York. " Before his arrest in May, Strauss-Kahn was widely predicted by polls as able to beat President Nicolas Sarkozy in next year's election.

Darlington Hoopes, the Socialist candidate for President in 1952 and 1956 and a former Pennsylvania state legislator, died Monday at a nursing home near Reading. He was 93. The son of Quakers, Hoopes studied agriculture at the University of Wisconsin but then turned to law, receiving his legal education largely through correspondence courses. He practiced law in Reading, a base for Socialist political sentiment in the 1930s and 1940s.

Pragmatic Socialist Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez was elected to a third term Sunday in a national parliamentary vote that proved both a runaway and a cliffhanger. The Socialist victory in the multi-party race was clear in results of exit polls broadcast within minutes after voting ended Sunday evening. Then came hours of waiting to see if Gonzalez had been able to preserve a majority that had been eight seats after the last elections in 1986. He did--barely.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy's center-right party was soundly defeated in the final round of France's regional elections held Sunday, in a sign of widespread disapproval of the administration two years before the next presidential election. A coalition of left-wing parties successfully garnered 54.3% of the vote, versus 36.1% for the right, according to an Opinion Way preliminary poll. The far-right National Front party won 8.7% of national votes, but took more than 20% of votes in certain regions.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet on Thursday presided over the signing of a number of bilateral scientific, agricultural and educational agreements, highlighting the growing trade and personal ties between California and a nation with one of South America's most dynamic economies.