Paris  - Former French presidential candidate Segolene Royal beat out two other candidates in Thursday's election to head the Socialist Party but fell short of gaining a winning majority, French media reported early Friday.

Royal will face off later on Friday in a run-off against the mayor of Lille, Martine Aubry, as party members go to the polls again to decide who will succeed Royal's former partner, Francois Hollande, as Socialist leader.

According to estimates based on partial vote counts, the 55-year- old Royal was credited with 42-43 per cent of the votes cast on Thursday, while Aubry received 34-35 per cent and EU deputy Benoit Hamon polled 23 per cent.

With Hamon expected to tell his supporters to cast their votes for Aubry, Royal faces a tough but not insurmountable task on Friday.

If she wins, she will have a big head start on becoming the Socialist candidate for the 2012 presidential election. If she is defeated, she will almost certainly have to bury her presidential ambitions.

Royal was soundly defeated in the 2007 presidential election by Nicolas Sarkozy and has called for an alliance with the centrist Modem party to unseat him in 2012.

In the election for party leader, she presented herself as an agent of renewal and placed herself squarely against the Socialist old guard, such as former prime minister Laurence Fabius and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the current head of the International Monetary Fund.

The 58-year-old Aubry is supported by the so-called party elephants and has rejected talk of a centrist alliance, although Aubry herself forged a deal with the Modem to win the election as Lille mayor.

A little less than 60 per cent of the party's 233,000 dues-paying members voted on Thursday. (dpa)