Word: socialists
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This week leftist unions and Socialist Party organizations will celebrate the first anniversary of the electoral victory that brought Mitterrand's Socialists and his Communist allies to power for the first time since the '30s. What the celebrators can cheer most honestly is just the sort of shrewd maneuver demonstrated by the President in the police-law dispute: compromise, adding the water of realism to his ideological wine...
Over the past year, Socialist platform planks have been whittled away by practical politics nearly every step of the way. Mitterrand had pledged to reduce compulsory military service from one year to six months, but the move would have increased unemployment. So it was shelved. Mitterrand wanted to impose new corporate taxes and raise social security contributions, but a jarring 10% drop in business investment last year forced the government to postpone $1.8 billion in new levies. Internationally, after signing an agreement to furnish Nicaragua's Sandinista regime with $90 million in defensive arms and after sounding...
...Socialist regime has been holding its own in most public polls, and Mitterrand's personal prestige scores consistently high in the surveys. IFOP pollsters determined last month that in a presidential runoff, Mitterrand would defeat Giscard 55% to 45%, a better showing than Mitterrand's 52% in 1981. A rather more critical-and realistic-sounding in March, however, went the other way, when voters in cantonal elections across the country gave 215 additional local seats to center-right candidates and also handed them control of 58 of 95 provincial councils...
French business interests, distressed by the Socialists' nationalization program, the initial trend toward taxes and expanded workers' benefits, are relieved by the moderating efforts of Finance Minister Jacques Delors. In the corporate community, notes one Paris-based diplomat, Delors is admired as "a sound, realistic numbers man, the lifeline to reality in a world of Socialist schoolteachers who have never met a payroll." Delors clearly had a part in narrowing the scope of the nationalization program that had been an integral element of the Socialist-Communist platform since 1972. Certain French subsidiaries of large foreign firms, such...
...term to which I was elected," he told one gathering. "I will not do it as a neutral witness to events but as an actor, and a lead actor of the everlastingness of France." Indeed, allows a close confidant, Mitterrand is already thinking in terms of a Socialist presidency lasting for 14 years-long enough "to penetrate French society with the kind of modifications that will be irreversible no matter what comes after-just as Louis XVIII did not try to reverse what Napoleon had done...