Word: cresson
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...President's May 15 selection of Edith Cresson as Prime Minister, to shake the nation out of its sullen mood, soured after little more than a month. With only a 38% public-approval rating, the bride of high office may be headed for divorce at a point when she has barely assembled her trousseau. French unemployment has reached 9.5%, and the record number of jobless looks as if it will go higher still. Meanwhile immigrant riots broke out in June, even as municipal policemen went on strike -- along with air-traffic controllers, railway workers and doctors...
...Cresson's idea was to rally the nation behind a centralized industrial policy, marshaling economic forces in a war footing against competitors -- notably her designated No. 1 enemy, Japan. But her summons to arms has fallen flat at a time when the treasury is tight and Paris is striving to meet the conflicting imperative of a less subsidized, state-driven economy in advance of Europe's experiment with open market frontiers...
Since taking office last month as France's first female Prime Minister, Edith Cresson has managed to incite fury abroad with her biting bouche. Shortly after her appointment, she declared on television that Japan was an "aggressor" that "lived in a universe different from ours, a universe of domination." The remarks prompted the Japanese Foreign Ministry to lodge a complaint with the French ambassador, and sparked protests outside the French embassy in Tokyo...
Last week Cresson drew fire again, this time for saying that Frenchmen are more interested in women than are men in the U.S., Germany and Britain -- where, she contended, a quarter of the males are homosexual. When these allegations, made in a 1987 interview for a book about women, were published in Britain's Sunday Observer, Cresson, 57, claimed that it was "not fair play" to pull an old conversation "out of a drawer." Throughout England, stiff upper lips quivered. "They don't call Paris 'Gay Paree' for nothing, you know," retorted the tabloid...
...Mitterrand's Iron Lady," as the French press has dubbed her, replaces Michel Rocard, 60, whose three-year-old government was having increasing trouble piecing together parliamentary majorities even as it battled a burgeoning campaign-finance scandal. The unenviable task of damage control now falls on Cresson, leaving Rocard free to pursue his 1995 presidential ambitions...