Word: giscards
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Mitterrand's legislative victory was also a vindication of his long-range political strategy. After winning the presidency last month with a surprise victory over Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the center-right incumbent, Mitterrand disbanded the National Assembly, which had been controlled by Giscard's coalition, an amalgam of the Gaullist and centrist forces that had run the government for 23 years. In the campaign to elect a new Assembly, Mitterrand was threatened from two directions. If the right regained control of the chamber, France could face a constitutional crisis; the institutions of the Fifth Republic are not designed...
...campaign was bitterly fought. On the far left, Communist Boss Georges Marchais trumpeted his party's readiness to "assume all its responsibilities, including in France's government." After seizing control of the center-right forces after Giscard's defeat, Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac enjoined his followers to "keep France from going the road of adventure that the ideologues of the Socialist Party have chosen." Giscard himself confined his activities to a few campaign appearances on behalf of the center-right candidate in his home district of Chamali?...
What the Socialists really promise is not so much a "new economic order" as a shift in priorities: the campaign against unemployment will now take precedence over Giscard's preoccupation with inflation fighting. Meanwhile, the new government has acted capably and responsibly on the monetary front, continuing ex-Premier Raymond Barre's efforts to shore up the sagging franc...
Even the highest levels of French politics tend to be knotted up in the same school ties. No fewer than eight members of Mitterrand's Socialist Cabinet, for example, are alumni of the vaunted Ecole Nationale d'Administration (E.N.A.), which also produced seven members of the outgoing Giscard government -including Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a top-ranked scholar of the class of '51. Foreign Minister Cheysson (class of '48) is an enarque, as products of the elite school are known, who previously held posts with the leftist Fourth Republic government of Pierre Mend...
...build up the bureaucratic self-esteem that was tarnished during the Nazi years. It accepts only 150 students annually. Almost invariably, graduates of E.N.A. are assured of getting top jobs in the civil service. Indeed, so well did De Gaulle's innovation flourish that technocrats like Giscard, Rocard and onetime French Premier Jacques Chirac were finally able to dominate the country's politics...