Word: rocard
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...strike that paralyzed France in May 1968 gave the world its first good look at the New Left, Gallic branch. Last week, for the first time, France voted a genuine New Leftist into office. In the unlikely setting of Les Yvelines, a largely middle-class district outside Paris, Michel Rocard, one of the few party leaders in France to side openly with the May revolutionaries, won election to the National Assembly. Rocard, 39, is the boyish-looking secretary of the tiny Unified Socialist Party (P.S.U.), whose slogan is "worker power, student power, peasant power." The man he defeated...
Becalmed Republic. Though some overenthusiastic reporters hailed Rocard as "the first swallow of a Socialist spring," his victory will hardly bring red flags and barricades into the elegant Bourbon Palace, where the Assembly meets. He is, after all, the only Deputy representing the P.S.U. so far. Moreover, under unwritten parliamentary rules that minimize the influence of small parties, he is entitled to hold the floor for only about an hour per year. From the viewpoint of President Georges Pompidou, Rocard's election may even prove a blessing. Four former Gaullist Ministers have won by-elections in recent weeks...
...Deputy, Rocard plans to work inside an Establishment that he would like to overturn. That is a role spurned by many New Leftists in favor of instant revolution, but it is not new for Rocard. Son of Physicist Yves Rocard, one of the developers of France's atom bomb, he graduated from the prestigious Ecole Nationale d'Administration and entered government service as an in-specteur des finances, one of the elite corps of officials who supervise state spending. It is a position that normally opens the door to the highest echelons of the government and big business...
Shrewd Judgment. Couve's distaste for campaigning helped Rocard. What aided him even more was the TV exposure he gained last May as a minor presidential candidate. Though he won only 3.6% of the vote and was eliminated in the first round, Rocard came across as an incisive, articulate and iconoclastic politician. He labeled the Communists "retrograde bureaucrats," denounced the Czechoslovak invasion, demanded that France withdraw from NATO and called for total worker control of private business. In his campaign for the Assembly, Rocard told audiences that France must discard its "model of American capitalism." He also criticized...
Familiar Dilemma. When the presidential lists officially closed last week, there were seven candidates. The others: Communist Jacques Duclos, 72, Socialist Gaston Defferre, 58, who named ex-Premier Pierre Mendes-France as his running mate and future Premier, insurgent Socialist Michel Rocard, 38, and Painter-Writer Louis Ducatel, 67, campaigning as an independent gadfly "individualist." The final candidate, Alain Krivine, 27, is a Trotskyite who speaks for the young men and women of the barricades of last...