Word: socialistic
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TIRED AND ILL WITH PROSTATE CANcer, Francois Mitterrand sat silently in a Louis XV armchair at the Elysee Palace, watching election returns. Was it only a dozen years ago that a vigorous Mitterrand, newly elected as France's Socialist President, marched solemnly up the steps of the Pantheon and placed red roses on the tombs of three leftist heroes while the streets of Paris rang with victory celebrations? Now as the results of last week's parliamentary vote flickered across the TV screen, the numbers confirmed what all had suspected: the Socialist era was over in France. Mitterrand's party...
...French election may well have signaled the final act in the history of West European socialism, whose roots, like the very notion of left and right politics, go back to the French Revolution. From Stockholm to Rome, from Lisbon to Bonn, socialist and social-democratic movements are in trouble. The Italian party is entangled in financial scandals that prompted Bettino Craxi's resignation as chairman and may put dozens of members behind bars. In Spain, Felipe Gonzalez's party could well face defeat in elections later this year. Britain's Labour Party has been unable to win a national election...
...MISTAKES, AND THERE WERE some, I truly don't think we deserved this," said former Prime Minister Michel Rocard as the returns poured in during the first round of France's parliamentary elections. Voters thought otherwise. Rocked by scandals and blamed for France's 10.5% unemployment rate, the ruling Socialists plunged from 34.7% of the vote in 1988 to 17.6%. The conservative alliance between former Prime Minister Jacques Chirac's Rally for the Republic (R.P.R.) and ex-President Valery Giscard d'Estaing's Union for French Democracy took 39.5%, which France's voting system was expected to translate into...
...example, Mao decided to skip the intermediate stages of "socialist construction" and go right to full communism. He called it the Great Leap Forward. It would take a million David Koreshes to kill the number of Chinese who perished (through famine, forced labor and civil unrest) to satisfy that lunge for the millennium. Two decades later, the Khmer Rouge murdered more than a million of their countrymen in an attempt, explained Khieu Samphan, to "reach total communism with one leap forward." Has any religious vision occasioned more human sacrifice than "total communism...
...outcome, like Switzerland itself, contained elements of both compromise and illogic. After rejecting one female legislator, on what some called sexist grounds, for membership on the ruling seven-member Federal Council, parliament approved a woman nonlegislator with the same background (a French-speaking socialist) and roughly similar political views (a reduced role for the military, pro-E.C.). The principal difference between the rejected Christiane Brunner and winner Ruth Dreifuss, says Dreifuss, is that "I reassure people because I look a little plain...