Word: mitterrand
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...government decided to use the police. Its timing was perfect. At least half of France was away on its relentless August holiday. Even so, 5,000 people demonstrated outside the Lip plant after the raid, and 20 were injured. Socialist Leader Francois Mitterrand and others were determined to make political capital out of L'Affaire Lip, even if they had to await la rentrée, Frenchmen's mass return from vacation. On any brand of watch, it was a tense time in France...
Just before last week's final ballot, Socialist François Mitterrand offered a wry description of how French voters approach an election. "On Monday you throw artichokes at the prefecture," he said. "On Tuesday it's potatoes. Wednesday you put up roadblocks, and on Thursday you break windows. You tie up downtown Paris on Friday and boo the Minister of Finance. I don't know what you do on Saturday, but on Sunday you vote for the government...
...they did. Despite the polls, the widespread dissatisfaction over inequities in French life and the staleness of President Georges Pompidou's Gaullists after 15 years in power, millions of French voters were still not ready to try the radical alternatives offered by Mitterrand's resurgent Socialists and his Communist allies. When the final results were in, the Gaullists and their coalition partners had lost 90 of the 365 seats that they held in the old National Assembly, but they still held 275 seats (out of 490), and a majority...
...making deep inroads into such traditional Communist strongholds as the working-class "Red belt" around Paris, François Mitterrand's once moribund Socialists surged to within 500,000 votes of the Communists - and raised a lot of old fears and jealousies. Threatened by the loss of his party's traditional position as the leader of the French left, Communist Marchais stubbornly rejected Mitterrand's proposal that both parties should back the leftist candidates most likely to win - which in any given district would most likely be the relatively respectable Socialist candidate rather than the Communist...
...united-left agreement: both parties would back the leftist who had led in the first round, whether he had any chance of winning the runoff or not. Explaining his stand, Marchais said that he would brook "no malodorous subterfuge, no bargaining in the wings, no doubtful schemes." Mitterrand? In a television address, he pointedly avoided using the word Communist at all and glumly predicted that "the battle of the second round will be difficult...