Word: french
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...meaning of the election can be summed up as a series of paradoxes. One, there can be no alternation in power, of the kind that exists in the U.S., in Britain or in West Germany, as long as the French C.P. pursues so sectarian a strategy as to keep a majority of the French from voting for a Left-wing coalition. Unlike the Italian C.P., the French one continues to put the preservation of its own integrity--its electoral base and its hostility to any reformism it could not control--ahead of everything else. It even discards the opportunities...
...Communists, their organization is far weaker, the strategy on which they had counted for their return to power as the dominant party of the Left is in ruins thanks to their ally, and they have no promising alternative course. "Objectively," in March 1978 as in May 1968, the French C.P. powerfully helped the regime...
...most important problems faced by France are those which the more statesmanlike Socialist leaders such as Michel Rocard have raised: debureaucratization, the opening up of elite and educational castes, the reorganization of French industry (threatened by outside competition and often kept alive only by state subsidies), a fairer tax and social security system, greater participation by workers in management, and by citizens in local government...
...president's new Union for French Democracy (UDF) is composed of factions whose past enthusiasm for reform has been either nil or purely verbal. The Socialists are unlikely to replace the Union of the Left with an alliance with the UDF: they would split their party if they tried, and they have somber memories of past centrist alliances, which killed the old Socialist party...
Therefore Giscard's conviction that France wants to be governed "in the center" runs against a stark political reality: the French center consists of two incompatible segments--Socialists who want movement above all, and Giscard's conservatives, who crave stability. Their addition would foster not effective government, but confusion and frustration...