France's Socialist Party, heir to some of the great figures of the European left, is fighting for its life, crippled by internal splits and leaving President Nicolas Sarkozy with no effective opposition.

Centre-left parties across Europe have been struggling generally in recent years. But the problems of France's Socialists, suffering from falling membership and lack of direction, are especially dire.

Things have got so bad that many of the party's own supporters are openly wondering if it would not be better to clean the slate and start all over again.

"The French Socialist party is at risk of dying out," Manuel Valls, one of a generation of rising 40-something party cadres, wrote in the Financial Times this week.

Valls, mayor of the town of Evry outside Paris who intends to run in the 2012 presidential election, has proposed dropping the title "Socialist" altogether to rid it of its 19th century associations.

That would be a radical step for a party that cherishes old heroes like Socialist pioneer Jean Jaures, assassinated on the eve of World War One, Leon Blum, head of the Popular Front government of the 1930s or former President Francois Mitterrand.

Valls, who has openly defied party leader Martine Aubry, has been one of the loudest voices calling for change but there have been plenty of others, from Mitterrand's former Culture Minister Jack Lang to Arnaud Montebourg, one of the prominent names from the younger generation.

"The impression created is one of complete party disunity," said Jean-Daniel Levy, head of the politics section of polling institute CSA. "There is no clearly defined policy and no clearly accepted leadership."

Centre-left parties across Europe have generally failed to make much of the widespread disgust with liberal free market policies generated by the financial crisis.

The problems of France's Socialists, however, combine falling membership and lack of leadership with a particularly toxic personal climate at the top of the party.

That has left Sarkozy virtually unchallenged, despite mediocre approval ratings and the widespread discontent shown up by repeated mass street protests against his economic policies.

"COLLECTIVE SUICIDE"

The Socialists' problems have been building up for years.

Beaten into third place in the 2002 presidential election by far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party embarked on an endless round of infighting and they lost again in 2007 when Sarkozy defeated Socialist candidate Segolene Royal.

The pain continued with last month's European elections, when they were trounced by Sarkozy's centre-right UMP party and only narrowly avoided being beaten by a Green alliance headed by former student radical Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

The party still has a strong hold at local government level, although that may change at regional elections next March, but despite much talk of "renewing the Socialist project", a series of special congresses has done nothing to restore confidence.

The chorus of doom has grown so loud that Socialist deputies issued a statement this week urging those "praying for a collective suicide" to stop.

Squeezed on the left by figures like Olivier Besancenot, the Trotskyist "Red Postman" who heads the New Anticapitalist Party, many Socialists are nonetheless suspicious of Northern European-style Social Democracy let alone the market-friendly policies of Britain's Labour Party.

Critics like Valls charge the party hierarchy with "kneejerk anti-Sarkozyism" and say it has failed to come up with any credible answers on issues ranging from globalised labour markets to immigration, social integration or the environment.

Sarkozy has added to the trauma, recruiting senior Socialists such as Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and adopting a distinctly left wing tone in lambasting capitalist excess in the financial crisis.

Aubry, architect of the famed 35 hour working week law, beat Royal in a bitter fight for the leadership last year but any hope that her victory might bring calm has long been abandoned.

Valls' Financial Times column this week was itself a mark of how far her authority has been undermined, coming as it did just days after she wrote to him saying that if he did not stop his criticisms he should leave the party.