SAINT-OUEN : Seeking a New Line
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The French Communist Party, in decline for 20 years, opens its annual congress in the suburbs of Paris today, with the top agenda item election of a successor to veteran leader Georges Marchais, 73, who is retiring.
The party has seen its support drop from 25% in the 1972 election, when Marchais took over and the Communists were the dominant force on the French left, to less than 10% last year.
Though there is no heir apparent, many in the party hope that a new leader will revitalize it by modernizing and softening what has been an ideological hard line.
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