ABSTRACT
The political characteristics of the twelve-year period in question can, broadly speaking, be characterized by consensus politics and co-habitation, on the one hand, and volatility and polarization on the other. As Mitterrand moved into the final years of his second term, he was forced, following the defeat of the PS in the 1993 legislative elections, to co-habit once again with a right-wing government. The final two years of Mitterrand’s presidency – and, to an extent, his political legacy as the Fifth Republic’s first Socialist president – were thus overshadowed by the practicalities and restrictions of co-habitation, as well as the continuation of high profile political scandals (two Socialist députés, Bernard Tapie and Alain Carignon, who had served in ministerial positions under Mitterrand were investigated and in Carignon’s case imprisoned in the mid 1990s for corruption). Added to this, were lingering doubts over Mitterrand’s attitude to Vichy, at a time when the nation’s role during the Occupation was still undergoing intense and painful (re)evaluation. In September 1994, almost two years after he had publicly laid a wreath at Pétain’s grave, Mitterrand called for national reconciliation over the events of the Occupation. The fact that this presidential plea for national unity coincided with questionable personal claims from Mitterrand that he knew nothing of anti-Semitic laws introduced by the Vichy regime under which he served between 1942 and 1943 only helped to further cloud the issue (Thody: 1998, 119-20). As if this scrutiny of Mitterrand’s own past and a sense of guilt by association with present day political scandals was not bad enough, the outgoing Socialist president was also seen by the electorate as responsible for the growing divide between
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joblessness from 1.5 million to 3 million during the same period. In short, the Mitterrand years were seen to be ‘ending in an atmosphere of total disillusionment’ (ibid., 120) that contrasted sharply with the wave of optimism that had greeted Mitterrand on his arrival in office 14 years earlier.
