Hollande in firing line as strains show

France's Socialist-led government is in disarray as lingering controversy over the deportation of a Roma family and a divisive primary vote in Marseille exposed deep-lying tensions in the ruling coalition.

President Francois Hollande's weekend intervention in a row over the fate of 15-year-old Leonarda Dibrani and her family has exacerbated divisions between right and left within the government alliance of the Socialist Party and the Greens.

By offering to allow Leonarda but not her siblings or parents to return to France from Kosovo, Hollande pleased virtually no one, and his clumsy attempt to close the debate has only served to enhance his reputation for dithering - or "cartoonish indecisiveness", in the words employed by one opposition leader, Francois Fillon.

Against that background, the Socialists could have done without the primary to select their candidate to be the next mayor of Marseille ending in an acrimonious public display of hostility towards the party's leadership.

Instead, defeated candidate Samia Ghali, who has emerged as a voice for the city's poorest neighbourhoods, publicly accused the party machine of ganging up against her and launched an attack on Hollande and his prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, over unhonoured promises of aid to the city.

The speech got the reaction it sought, leaving Socialist spin doctors to try and explain why Hollande and Ayrault were being publicly booed and jeered at by activists in their own party.

Dissent was not restricted to the grass roots. Harlem Desir, the First Secretary of the party, made it clear he disagreed with Hollande's handling of the Leonarda case, as did the Greens, who published a statement characterising the president's offer to the girl as "inhuman".

A group of 25 leftwing Socialist deputies who have formed a group called "The Lasting Left" issued a statement expressing their exasperation over the government's economic and social policies.