Word: mitterrand
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...both the right and the left. In France, the antiimmigrant, law-and-order National Front, a far-right organization led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former paratrooper, won 11% of the vote. The chief victims in France were the Communists, who have four seats in Socialist President Francois Mitterrand's Cabinet. They dropped to 11.3% of the vote, their lowest showing since 1932 and the most crushing blow in a long decline. In West Germany, it was the surge of the environmentalist, anti-NATO Green Party that shocked the political establishment by winning 8.2% of the vote...
...France had expected Mitterrand's Socialist-Communist alliance to survive the elections without some damage. In opinion polls and local elections, the government had steadily been slipping since it came to power in 1981 with an overwhelming legislative majority. No sounding, however, had warned that the Socialists would get a mere 20.8% of the total. Even counting the Communist votes, the left's combined total of 32% could only be interpreted as a stunning rejection of the government...
...spoken publicly about the voting results. Marchais's pro-Soviet line has been under fire by some French comrades since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Moscow's crackdown on Poland. The party was further handicapped by its ambivalent role as both a junior partner in the Mitterrand Cabinet and a critic of the government's unpopular economic austerity measures. Said a government official last week: "The Communists' best bet might be to leave the government now. Maybe a round of hard-nosed opposition would help them pull themselves together." In the longer run, Mitterrand...
...debt issue also led to the most serious strains of the meeting, when French President Mitterrand declared that "there can be no serious treatment of the debt problem without a lowering of real interest rates." That in turn paved the way for discussion of the U.S. budget deficit. Later, U.S. Treasury Secretary Regan refused to acknowledge a link between the deficit and high interest rates. The outcome in the communiqué was a declaration that high interest rates could threaten recovery, and a call for "prudent monetary and budgetary policies...
Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was 14 in 1944, had earlier denied reports that he officially sought to be included in the Normandy gathering. According to his aides, however, he had indicated to French President Francois Mitterrand last February that in the spirit of reconciliation, he would not mind being present. Mitterrand shrugged off the hint, and Kohl swallowed the rejection. Said Kohl last week: "The German Chancellor has no reason to celebrate when others celebrate a victory in battle that cost 10,000 German soldiers their lives." Neither Bonn nor the West German public took much comfort from a French...