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Villepin defeats no-trust motion

Vaiju Naravane

Paris: Embattled French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin easily defeated the no-confidence motion tabled against him by the Opposition Socialist Party, but it became clear that his party members' confidence in him has been badly shaken.

In recent weeks he has been accused of using a dirty tricks campaign to smear his bitter political rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy in what has come to be known as the Clearstream affair.

With an overwhelming majority in the House - the ruling conservative UMP has 360 MPs in a chamber of 577 deputies - the result was never in doubt. In all, 289 votes were required to defeat the Prime Minister and only 190 votes could be garnered against him. What is truly significant however is that only 157 of the ruling UMP Party's 364 MPs turned up for the debate and the sparsely populated treasury benches showed the degree of demoralisation that has swept the party.

Opening the debate, Opposition leader Francois Hollande poured scorn on Mr. De Villepin's administration which he said, was "no longer a Government, but a battle-field" that had provoked "one of the gravest crises in the Fifth Republic."

Throughout Mr De Villepin's speech, Mr Sarkozy absented himself from the chamber.

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