Word: gaullists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lights glared, the survivors of the first round of France's presidential election faced each other last week in a 2-hr. 20-min. debate watched by some 30 million citizens. Billed as the high point of the electoral campaign, the duel between Socialist President Francois Mitterrand and Neo- Gaullist Premier Jacques Chirac produced no clear-cut winner. The dislike was almost palpable, however, between the two men who had been cohabiting, in French parlance, as government leaders for the past two years. During an exchange in which each candidate attempted to suggest that the other was soft on terrorism...
Chirac, the first of the major candidates to enter the race, conducted a run-everywhere campaign and relied heavily on the formidable organization of his neo-Gaullist Rally for the Republic Party. Barre, by contrast, played down his association with the Union for French Democracy, a loose coalition of center-right parties, and consequently failed to secure a partisan boost. Even though Barre, an economics professor, offered a more trenchant critique of Mitterrand's economic and defense policies than Chirac, all too often he did so in a style better suited to university lecture halls than to political rallies. Said...
...Barre was not the only candidate to try. In a campaign that has heavily emphasized style over substance, Gaullist imagery cropped up often enough, as it has in past contests, to give an eerie ring of arrived truth to Charles de Gaulle's imperious prophecy that "every Frenchman was, is or one day will be a Gaullist." Mitterrand, an opponent of De Gaulle for the ten years of the general's presidency, also presented himself as an above-the-fray candidate, rarely mentioning the word Socialist and allowing himself to be described by Socialist Party Chairman Lionel Jospin...
...contrast, is such a dynamo that his handlers have tried to tone down his hard-charging image with a poster bearing the slogan COURAGE -- THAT'S CHIRAC and showing an ostensibly relaxed Premier dressed in a V-neck sweater. Moreover, he commands the formidable political machinery of the neo- Gaullist Rally for the Republic Party, which expects to spend $25 million on the campaign. Chirac is running on his record as Premier for the past two years, claiming that his government has cut unemployment rolls by 130,000, boosted economic output by 3.5% and won its war on terrorism. Asks...
...crisis rallied popular support behind the government. Approval ratings for both the neo-Gaullist Chirac and Socialist President Francois Mitterrand jumped in opinion polls. Inevitably, though, the ongoing tension spurred some politicking. Nearly 2,000 protesters showed up when the National Front, the far-rightist party led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, defied a government ban by staging a noisy rally in the Place de l'Opera. Le Pen criticized the government for its "nonchalant" attitude toward terrorism...