France

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7

The Presidency of François Mitterrand

In 1981, following a Socialist victory at the polls, François Mitterrand replaced Giscard as president, and Pierre Mauroy became prime minister. Repudiating many of the policies of its predecessor, the Mitterrand government nationalized major banks and industrial firms, raised taxes, expanded social benefits, increased the number of public jobs, abolished the death penalty, and ended the centralized prefectural administration system established by Napoleon. In 1982 and 1983 an economic slowdown and the poor performance of state-owned enterprises led the government to impose currency devaluations and austerity measures. In July 1984 Mitterrand reshuffled his Cabinet; the Communists, who had held four portfolios in the previous Cabinet, declined to participate in the new one. Laurent Fabius became the youngest prime minister in French history at the age of 37. In 1986, after right-wing parties won a narrow victory in elections for the National Assembly, Mitterrand chose a new prime minister, Jacques Chirac, a founder of the moderate party Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) and mayor of Paris. It was the first time opposing parties had governed together since 1958. Chirac lost the 1988 presidential election to Mitterrand, who then chose a fellow Socialist, Michel Rocard, as prime minister.

After France failed in diplomatic efforts to get Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, the French military fought as part of coalition forces in the Gulf War. In May 1991 Rocard resigned, and Mitterrand appointed Edith Cresson, also a Socialist, as France’s first woman prime minister. An outspoken, controversial figure, she was replaced by Pierre Bérégovoy in April 1992, after the Socialists suffered losses in regional elections. In the parliamentary elections of March 1993, the Socialist Party lost its majority in the New Assembly to the Conservatives. The Union for France, a coalition of Chirac’s RPR, the Union for French Democracy (led by former president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing), and several minor conservative parties, won a total of 484 seats to the Socialists’ 54 seats. President Mitterrand appointed Édouard Balladur, a member of the RPR, as prime minister.

In May 1993 an audit commissioned by Balladur’s new government revealed that former prime minister Bérégovoy had either mismanaged the economy or misled the French people regarding the economic situation of France, which was actually poor, with mounting unemployment (over 3 million by 1993), weak competitively, and had a serious balance of payments problem. It was feared that the high budget deficit, much worse than previously believed, could jeopardize the country’s plans to take part in full European monetary union, timetabled for 1997. (Earlier, voters had narrowly approved the Treaty of Maastricht, strengthening integration within the European Union.) Prior to the publishing of the audit, Bérégovoy committed suicide, distressed by allegations regarding it and a loan that he had received in 1986. Balladur introduced privatization programmes and structural reforms to tackle France’s economic woes, but many of these were retracted or modified following sometimes violent protests by various affected interest groups.

Balladur and his coalition government won the elections of March 1994, with 45 per cent of the vote compared to more than 22 per cent for the Socialist Party and 1.1 per cent for the Communists. In May, the Channel Tunnel rail link between France and Britain running beneath the English Channel was officially inaugurated; shuttle services began in November. In September, embarrassing information surfaced regarding President Mitterrand’s close wartime links with collaborationists in the Vichy government. Jacques Delors, the widely respected Socialist President of the European Union, declined to run in December in the forthcoming French presidential elections. A 50 per cent devaluation in January 1994 of the CFA franc used in African Franc Zone countries caused widespread economic disruption in these states.

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8

The Chirac Presidency

Following a divisive presidential campaign that pitted him against his fellow RPR member Balladur and his former allies in the governing Union for France coalition, Jacques Chirac won the presidential elections in May 1995 with just over 52 per cent of the poll. He appointed Alain Juppé as his prime minister. The new government plunged France into international controversy by resuming testing of nuclear weapons at Mururoa in the South Pacific in October (shortly after the 50th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), which led to worldwide boycotts of French goods and rioting in French Polynesia. Deficit-cutting measures to restructure the social security system, introduced by Juppé in November, led to nearly one third of public employees going on strike in protest: the government responded with concessions that split their union opponents. Also in December, France announced that it would rejoin the command structure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which it had left in 1966, reversing three decades of Gaullist defence autonomy. Former president François Mitterrand died of cancer in January 1996, and was given a state funeral.

In February 1996, the French parliament approved a constitutional change proposed by Juppé to hand budgetary control of the social security system from trade unions and employers to parliament. After the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis of early 1996, in which EU sales of beef plummeted following the revelation that BSE, endemic in British cows, might cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, public indignation erupted in France in June 1996 when it was revealed that Britain had exported infected animal feed to France after banning its domestic sale. France responded by turning against British efforts to remove the EU-imposed global ban on British beef exports. President Chirac called snap parliamentary elections in June 1997, but the right-wing parties were defeated by the Socialist Party, in alliance with the Communist and Green parties. The leader of the Socialist Party, Lionel Jospin, became prime minister, and France entered a period of “cohabitation” with a right-wing president and a left-wing government.

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9

The Jospin Administration

Jospin came to power with the prospect of implementing numerous and often contradictory manifesto promises, the legacy of a somewhat ill-disciplined coalition election campaign. His chief policy priorities were reducing France’s high level of unemployment and readying the French economy for membership of the European single currency proposed for 1999 under the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) timetable.

France had a major diplomatic defeat at the NATO summit in July 1997, when French initiatives to secure Slovenia and Romania’s accession to NATO and changes in the NATO command structure both failed; in the event, only Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic were admitted to NATO, while French hopes of rejoining the organization’s military command suffered a major setback. Early Socialist pledges to halt privatization of French state assets were soon abandoned, with the announcement in July of plans to privatize half of France Telecom. In September 1997, however, the head of Air France resigned over Jospin’s decision, under pressure from his Communist coalition partners, to halt privatization of the airline. A main plank of Jospin’s job-creation programme, formally unveiled in October 1997, was a controversial proposal to cut France’s official working week from 39 to 35 hours and redistribute the working hours released, a plan criticized by many economists and business leaders. However, Jospin also faced continuing unrest over labour issues, including a lorry drivers’ blockade in November, and in January and February 1998 massed demonstrations and occupations of unemployment benefit offices by French unemployed seeking extra unemployment assistance. Jospin ended the occupations with a mixture of force and compromise. In May 1998 strong French lobbying forced a compromise over the proposed Dutch head of the future European central bank to oversee the single European currency, who consequently would be replaced by a French official halfway through his first eight-year term. Also in May the French parliament passed the legislation for Jospin’s working hours reduction plan.

In March 1999 Laurent Fabius, the former prime minister, and colleagues were controversially acquitted of manslaughter and negligence by the newly formed Court of Justice of the Republic over the distribution of HIV-contaminated blood for haemophiliacs during his period in office. In the same month, France joined the Western military effort against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia over Yugoslav actions in the province of Kosovo.

In December 1999 France announced it would sue the European Union for failing to protect consumers from health risks that France alleged were posed by British beef. The European Union had lifted a three-year worldwide embargo on British beef after the British government admitted that a link might exist between Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and the fatal neurological disease Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) from August 1, 1999. However, France continued to block imports, claiming the UK measures for safeguarding the consumer were inadequate. Attempts to resolve the issue in the following months failed, fuelling the 'beef war'. In December 2001 the European Court of Justice declared the ban as illegal.

When, in January 2001, a law was passed that recognized as genocide the mass killing of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire during World War I in 1915, a wave of outrage was provoked in Turkey, which then reacted with a series of economic reprisals against French firms. Soon after, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain led the French government to introduce controls on the movement of all farm animals; in March the first case of foot-and-mouth in France was reported. At the same time, despite the continuing ban on the import of British beef, the spread of BSE from French meat continued to grow.

Eric Halphen, the magistrate investigating alleged criminal corruption by Jacques Chirac as mayor of Paris from 1977-1995, announced on April 26 that he had “plausible” evidence against the president. However, the Cour de Cassation (France’s highest appeals court) dismissed the case in October on the grounds that as the existing president he could not be compelled to give evidence and was immune from prosecution. The investigations were suspended.

On May 2 the National Assembly approved proposals to give greater autonomy to Corsica. The proposals provided for the devolution to the Corsican Assembly of certain powers. Following the approval of the bill there was an increase in violence on the island. The bill received final endorsement in December, although in a heavily modified form. The separatist Corsican National Liberation Front (FLNC) announced that it had abandoned its ceasefire signed in December 1999 in protest. A Constitutional Council on January 17 ruled the bill unconstitutional.

A Toulouse chemical fertilizer factory exploded on September 21, 2001, killing 29 people and seriously injuring many hundreds. Investigations concluded that the blast was an accident, which contradicted concerns that the explosion was the result of terrorist action. The incident took place only 10 days after the attacks on the US cities of New York and Washington, D.C.

On January 1, 2002, France adopted Euro notes and coins along with 11 other European nations.

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10

2002 Elections and Beyond

In the first round of the presidential elections, held in mid-April 2002, more than a dozen candidates stood. This fact, coupled with the public's disenchantment with the socialist government of Jospin, severely split the vote and led to Jean-Marie Le Pen of the extreme right National Front party taking second place behind the incumbent Chirac. Faced with this loss, Jospin announced his retirement from politics and Le Pen and Chirac went forward to the second round of voting in early May. Appalled with the success of Le Pen (who took nearly 17 per cent of the vote in the first round), over 1 million people took to the streets in protest before the second round of voting, and, with a big anti-Le Pen campaign in full swing, Chirac won over 82 per cent of the votes in the second round. He appointed Jean-Pierre Raffarin as the interim prime minister in preparation for the parliamentary elections in June. Raffarin remained as prime minister after the elections, which saw the Union pour la Majorité Presidentielle (UMP), a coalition of groups supporting Chirac, win an absolute majority in the National Assembly.

At the Bastille Day parade in Paris in July there was an assassination attempt on Chirac, who survived unscathed. In the growing unrest over Iraq in early 2003, France sided with Germany and Russia in requesting further time for weapons inspectors to complete their jobs. In March the three countries said that they would veto any UN resolution that authorized war on Iraq. The rift between France and the UK, and in particular the US, grew in the run-up to the military campagn in the Middle East with further ire reserved for Jacques Chirac's decision to welcome international pariah Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, to meetings of the Franco-African summit in Paris.

In early 2003 constitutional changes were enacted to allow for limited devolution to the regions. In a referendum held to decide Corsica’s future in July there was a narrow margin of victory to those opposing the devolution move. Summer temperatures in France, as elsewhere in Europe, were some of the hottest on record. The health ministry announced that around 15,000 people died of the heat in the summer period, most of them elderly. Raffarin promised an investigation into the response of the medical authorities during the crisis. In February 2004 controversial legislation was passed banning the wearing of overtly religious clothing in state schools. The controversy focused on the wearing of the Islamic headscarf by girls.

Alain Juppé, former prime minister, on trial for his alleged involvement in corrupt practices during his years as secretary-general of the Rassemblement pour la République (RPR), was found guilty in January 2004. He received an 18 months’ suspended sentence and was barred from holding political office for 10 years. President Chirac's UMP coalition lost ground in regional elections held in March 2004. Prime Minister Raffarin resigned but was immediately reappointed by Chirac.

In July, Chirac announced that France would hold a referendum on the proposed constitution for the European Union, drawn up by a convention under Giscard d’Estaing. The campaign was hard fought, and Chirac staked a great deal of his authority on its success. However, the increasing unpopularity of both Chirac and the Raffarin government contributed to the eventual rejection of the constitution when the vote was held in May 2005. Raffarin subsequently resigned, and Chirac controversially appointed Dominique de Villepin, a close ally who had served as a minister in Raffarin’s government but was not an elected member of the legislature, as the new prime minister.

An immediate problem facing the new prime minister was the unrest and street rioting in Paris that followed the deaths of two young men of North African origin, who were electrocuted after allegedly being chased by police into an electricity substation. The rioting in Paris spread to other French cities and the violence was fanned by the interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy calling the rioters a “rabble”. Curfew measures were introduced before the riots ended in mid-November 2005. Among the other pressing challenges that Villepin faced was France’s high rate of unemployment (close to 10 per cent in March 2006). Villepin’s government introduced legislation to make it easier for employers to lay off employees under the age of 26, in the hope that this would encourage job creation. However, in March 2006 huge demonstrations opposing the law were held in Paris, protesting that such legislation would simply serve to create a pool of easily disposable labour. Strike action followed in April and under public pressure Chirac announced that the new law on youth employment would be abandoned.

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11

The Sarkozy Presidency

The UMP leader Nicolas Sarkozy won the French presidential election in May 2007 by securing 53 per cent of the vote in the second-round run-off against the socialist candidate Ségolène Royal, who took 47 per cent. A divisive and controversial figure in French politics, the right-wing Sarkozy, formerly the minister of the interior, gained a formidable reputation following his comments during the rioting in French cities in 2005 and his tough stance on the entry of Turkey into the European Union. Sarkozy has promised to reform France, by bringing down employment, ending restrictions on the 35-hour working week, cutting taxes, and controlling immigration. Sarkozy appointed François Fillon as prime minister.

Sarkozy’s UMP won the general election of June 2007, taking 313 seats in the National Assembly though losing ground to the Socialists. Fillon was re-appointed prime minister.