Word: waldeck
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...surprisingly, both parties immediately started talking of extending the leftist alliance beyond the elections. At a meeting of Socialist leaders, Mitterrand put through a resolution calling for the "immediate creation of a permanent delegation of the left" to work out parliamentary tactics with the Communists. Waldeck Rochet, the balding boss of the French Communists, went even farther. The party's aim, he declared, was that "all groups and Deputies of the left reach common positions on the essential questions, national and international...
...days after the first round Mitterand met with Waldeck-Rochet, the leader of the Communists, to decide which leftist candidates should step down. When the two groups originally planned the alliance they assumed that the leftist candidate with the most votes would continue into the final-round and all others would withdraw. In many districts, however, a Communist polled more votes than a moderate socialist yet still had no chance of winning even if the other leftists withdrew. The leaders of the left assumed that while most Communists would vote in the second round for a socialist, there were thousands...
...Waldeck-Rochet and Mitterand reached a remarkable agreement during their negotiations after the first round. They decided that the strongest place candidate should proceed into the final round even if he had not received more votes than the other leftists in the first round. With unprecedented cooperative spirit the Communists agreed to sacrifice 15 of their own candidates who had polled in the first round more votes than the socialists they eventually supported...
...leftist alliance was no more than an electrol arrangement designed to defeat Gaullists wherever possible -- there was no attempt to formulate a joint postelection program. But the experiment will have important implications for the future. It demonstrates that Waldeck-Rochet's efforts to lead the Communists out of their ghetto have largely been successful. An alliance with a Communist is no longer, apparently, the kiss of death in French politics...
...sawdust floor in Murat and told 300 townsmen that the government had forgotten them. Socialist Leader François Mitterrand was in Ussel, holding forth on the evils of "caste and privilege" in a hall that stank of sweat and Gauloise Bleue cigarettes. And at Aubervilliers, Communist Waldeck Rochet denounced "social demagoguery" in a suitably dingy gymnasium...