There was just one cloud for French socialists in an otherwise rosy sky on Monday. As François Hollande's party celebrated winning an outright majority of seats in parliament, the defeat of the president's former partner and mother of his four children, Ségolène Royal, prompted little shock – the polls had seen it coming – but an outpouring of sadness from colleagues.
What made Royal's trouncing worse was that she lost to a dissident Socialist candidate, Olivier Falorni, who had rejected the party's request to stand down when she scored higher in the first round a week ago. Even more humiliating was that Falorni had received a tweeted message of support from Hollande's new partner, Valérie Trierweiler, reportedly sent in a fit of jealousy.
Le Point magazine said Royal, who unsuccessfully stood against Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential race, had suffered a "slow descent into hell" after losing a contest to head the Socialist party and then the party's presidential primaries, and now the election for the parliamentary seat of La Rochelle.
The government spokesperson Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said Royal's defeat was "an important shadow" on the electoral map. "We need her," she said. Royal had been the "legitimate candidate for the Socialist party and the left, who ended up beaten by a man with extremely strong personal ambition, used by local members of the right ready to do anything to beat Ségolène Royal".
Jack Lang, the former culture minister and a Socialist party grandée, also lost his seat, but all government ministers – under threat of having to resign if they did not win – were elected.
On the right, the former ruling UMP was left trying to show some semblance of unity as several candidates jostled to position themselves as future leaders of the party after its electoral collapse.
Sarkozy's hawkish former interior minister Claude Guéant, whose hard stance on immigration was widely credited with taking the party into Front National territory, failed to get elected, as did the former family minister Nadine Morano, who had suggested the UMP and FN shared the same values and that the FN leader, Marine Le Pen, had "talent".
In the centre, François Bayrou, who ran against Hollande in the presidential election, lost the seat in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques that he had held on and off since 1988. The far-right Le Pen narrowly lost her election battle, but her 22-year-old niece Marion Maréchal Le Pen won a seat in Provence, becoming the youngest MP in France since 1791 and one of three FN MPs.
The Socialist party won 314 of the 577 parliamentary seats, giving it an absolute majority in the national assembly. The party also controls the upper house, the senate, as well as most regional councils and the authorities in France's major cities. A record 155 women were elected to parliament.
