Word: socialists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...France's Lady of the Left Ségolène Royal has succeeded by presenting herself as the image of honorable French womanhood and employing the politics of charm [Oct. 9]. She is adept at handling policy issues pragmatically rather than ideologically. Since her partner, Socialist Party secretary François Hollande, has also been touted as a potential presidential candidate, there is an across-the-water parallel. Like Hillary and Bill Clinton in the U.S., this may be another welcome case of getting two for the price of one. Martin L. Grey High Wycombe, England...
...first to acknowledge that most HRL members are more on the ideological fringe of the Harvard student body than their pro-choice counterparts—we do not have the membership numbers of the Harvard College Democrats or the Harvard Republican Club. Groups like the Socialist Alternative, the May Day Coalition, the Student Labor Action Movement, and other projects spearheaded by the campus left are in a similar position to HRL with respect to membership size...
Where does representative democracy end and populism begin? The question has been posed high and low in France for the last couple of days since S?gol?ne Royal, the clear frontrunner to be the Socialist candidate in next spring's presidential election, proposed tossing a new wrench in the already dysfunctional French mode of governance. Her idea is to establish "citizens' juries," drawn by random lot, to assess the work of representatives between elections. Such "popular surveillance" of deputies and other elected officials, she said, would help bridge France's chronic gulf between the elected and the electorate...
...Still, the idea seemed to jeopardize the apparently impregnable lead Royal maintains over her Socialist rivals, former Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn and former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius. They both gleefully attacked the juries this week in the second of four televised debates scheduled before Socialists select their candidate in mid-November. Strauss-Kahn noted that a just society can't be "built on the general suspicion" invoked by subjecting elected officials to juries. Fabius suggested the idea was "a kind of populism that would end up serving the far right...
...process they managed only to drive home the fact that Royal is setting the agenda for the Socialist race, to the consternation of her more experienced and older rivals. The jury concept fits neatly into her broad emphasis on"participative democracy" and "citizen experts." Few political experts beyond Royal know exactly how those ideas are supposed to be applied, and she's been deliberately vague on the details. But what do they know? As so often in the past, the polls came to her rescue. One commissioned by the daily Le Parisien after the debate found that...