Word: socialists
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When the members of the French socialist Party held their summer seminar in the pretty coast town of La Rochelle last month, they discussed the sort of topics that only a true policy wonk could love. Does there need to be "a new equilibrium between labor and capital"? Is Latin America "the new horizon of socialism"? [an error occurred while processing this directive] Behind the high-toned banter, however, lay a visceral political yearning. France's left has not held the nation's presidency since 1995, and it is hungry for power. It might be thought odd, then, that...
...nomination sewn up. But on the whole, the French political parties remain clannish clusters of ideological currents owing fealty to male leaders. "All the polls show French society to be very open to the idea of a woman President," says Françoise Gaspard, a feminist sociologist and former Socialist Deputy. "But the political parties are still very archaic, controlled by men who can't stand the idea. The fact that Ségolène is no longer acting as a 'comrade' but as a rival is completely astonishing for them, and completely insufferable." There's a history...
...last month, news leaked out that the Finance Ministry is considering plans to suppress inheritance tax between spouses in next year's budget. The prospect of such a measure, estimated to cost the treasury about €400 million per year in lost revenue, immediately sparked uproar, with the opposition Socialist Party condemning it as an "unacceptable gift to the well off." Less predictably, it was also criticized as "inopportune" by Pierre Méhaignerie, a conservative and Chirac ally who heads the Parliament's finance committee. Méhaignerie told the French daily Le Figaro that the government should...
...providing "Club Med" troops-why wouldn't they be for Paris? After all, France is on the Security Council, helped write 1701, and considers Lebanon a vital area of foreign policy. Taking scoldings from George Bush and Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi was bad enough. But even the Socialist opposition was making hay of France's reluctance, with Secretary-General Francois Hollande telling Le Monde that France " appears to be a spectator...
...Disgusted by the country's traditional political class, voters in 2002 turned in droves to the Workers Party, and installed the socialist former blue-collar worker Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as president. But last year, Lula's reputation as a politician above reproach was shattered when investigators found that his government had handed out envelopes stuffed with cash to anyone who would support it in Congress. When it was revealed last month that scores of the country's deputies were skimming money off government contracts to purchase ambulances, it was hard for the citizenry to work up anything more...