ABSTRACT
The Left-Right division in France, while still much more than an empty shell, has lost a significant part of its substance. Opinion polls show that a growing proportion
of the French – 62 per cent in 1996 – consider that the division between Left and Right is ‘out of date’. The most traditional elements of that division, the régime and the Church, have clearly weakened. The division centred on class and the management of the economy had blurred somewhat after the great U-turn of 1983. No new Socialist campaign would promise a ‘rupture with capitalism’; no election would be seen, as those of 1978 and 1981 were by both politicians and observers, as entailing a choix de société – a systemic choice between capitalism and socialism. All governments will govern within capitalism, using their limited margins of manoeuvre in somewhat different ways, but also in unexpectedly similar ones: the Left, for example, has now been responsible for a greater volume of privatisations, in money terms, than the Right.
