Word: socialists
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...should have seen it coming. A few weeks ago, I asked a French friend why Lionel Jospin, the Socialist candidate for the presidency, had such difficulty connecting with the voters. "They just don't like him," my friend shrugged, as the French do. Worthy and whiny, and with that pursed-lips seriousness that the French think characteristic of Protestants like him, Jospin proved incapable of inspiring his natural constituency...
...siphoned votes away from him. Still, the question remains: Why did so many voters desert the mainstream candidates? How about: because they are bored stiff with them. Chirac first served as Prime Minister in--this is not a misprint--1974. Jospin has been a leading light in the Socialist Party since 1973. Imagine being asked to choose, this year, between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford: you'd look elsewhere...
...style--was unthinkable; it was to lose the possibility of Germanness. A few artists of Richter's generation found a way to use this. Richter, in cahoots with his then friend Sigmar Polke, developed a kind of bony, disenchanted Pop Art. They called it, in ironic tribute to the Socialist Realism then mandatory in communist countries, Capitalist Realism...
...telephone exchanges, village administration offices, bridges, clinics, dams, irrigation and drinking-water projects?and the homes of the "people's enemies" are being leveled. Their aim, the Maoists admit, is to achieve Year Zero, a reference to the Khmer Rouge genocide that was to clear the way for a socialist utopia. "At first, we just wanted to destroy all the government institutions in the village," Junge Kuna village leader Ghopal Phandari, 23, told me deep in rebel territory in Dang. "But then we decided to block any access to the villages by blowing up bridges?one time...
Seeking to explain the result, some critics have charged that Jospin simply lacked charisma and that his distant, professorial manner alienated too many potential voters. Others have pointed out that the left-wing vote was split by a proliferation of small, competing parties whose very success robbed the Socialist party of the votes it needed to finish in second place. Still others have suggested that a sense of complacency had developed within France’s two main parties and that they were upstaged by a crafty campaign from Le Pen’s National Front. None of these views...