Word: mitterrand
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This week leftist unions and Socialist Party organizations will celebrate the first anniversary of the electoral victory that brought Mitterrand's Socialists and his Communist allies to power for the first time since the '30s. What the celebrators can cheer most honestly is just the sort of shrewd maneuver demonstrated by the President in the police-law dispute: compromise, adding the water of realism to his ideological wine...
Over the past year, Socialist platform planks have been whittled away by practical politics nearly every step of the way. Mitterrand had pledged to reduce compulsory military service from one year to six months, but the move would have increased unemployment. So it was shelved. Mitterrand wanted to impose new corporate taxes and raise social security contributions, but a jarring 10% drop in business investment last year forced the government to postpone $1.8 billion in new levies. Internationally, after signing an agreement to furnish Nicaragua's Sandinista regime with $90 million in defensive arms and after sounding...
...Socialist regime has been holding its own in most public polls, and Mitterrand's personal prestige scores consistently high in the surveys. IFOP pollsters determined last month that in a presidential runoff, Mitterrand would defeat Giscard 55% to 45%, a better showing than Mitterrand's 52% in 1981. A rather more critical-and realistic-sounding in March, however, went the other way, when voters in cantonal elections across the country gave 215 additional local seats to center-right candidates and also handed them control of 58 of 95 provincial councils...
...Mitterrand takes a long view, assured that he will be President for a full seven years. Touring the Limousin region in south-central France last week, Mitterrand sounded a De Gaulle-like note of destiny. "I will stay until the end of the term to which I was elected," he told one gathering. "I will not do it as a neutral witness to events but as an actor, and a lead actor of the everlastingness of France." Indeed, allows a close confidant, Mitterrand is already thinking in terms of a Socialist presidency lasting for 14 years-long enough "to penetrate...
...Mitterrand faces a major challenge from people of his own party's stripe: French workers. After a honeymoon period of benign cooperation with the government, unions are becoming increasingly unruly. Last month a walkout disrupted production at the country's two major automobile companies, Renault and Citroën. Laborers at both firms were demanding higher wages and other benefits. Coming from the Socialist President's natural constituency, such unrest should remind Mitterrand that support can never be taken for granted, and that in politics, seven years, not to say 14, is a very long time...