Word: socialist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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France is loosening its system of dirigisme, or state direction of business, which goes back to the 17th century and Jean Baptiste Colbert, the minister to Louis XIV. Socialist President Francois Mitterrand nationalized 39 banks and five major industries soon after taking office in 1981. He changed course later, but not before the political damage had been done. Last March a right-wing coalition that promised to denationalize companies and promote business won control of the National Assembly. Now Mitterrand and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac are locked in a struggle over terms for selling off state-owned corporations. A particularly...
...Italy, former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, a Socialist, created a capitalist renaissance that appears likely to last. During the three-year rule of Craxi, whose government fell last month, the country's mood had changed. Says Arrigo Levi, one of the country's best-known journalists: "There is a new belief in market forces, in private enterprise, in the value of work itself, and that has been accompanied by a crumbling away of the idea that the state owes you a living...
...Communists began to look like just another party that would compromise and make back-room deals. In Italy, the party's break with Moscow left voters questioning what kind of program the Communists would put into place. The French Communists' decision to join, then pull out of, a Socialist government had comrades grousing that the alliance had been a tactical mistake...
Bastille Day is traditionally a day for the French to put aside their % differences. But no sooner had Socialist President Francois Mitterrand and conservative Premier Jacques Chirac finished their review of the military parade at the Place de la Concorde last week than Mitterrand issued the sharpest challenge yet to the conservative government with which he has uneasily shared power since March...
Chirac and the Socialist forces also pedaled at cross purposes in two other major controversies last week...