ABSTRACT
From its beginnings, French socialism has been oscillating between revolutionary and pragmatic politics (Bell 1998). As late as the 1970s, France’s socialists made common cause with the French Communist Party (PCF) in hopes of “breaking with capitalism.” After François Mitterrand was elected president in 1981, the two parties formed the fi rst left-wing government of the Fifth Republic. In spite of its grand aspirations, this coalition failed spectacularly. After just one year in government, it had to abandon its socialist course, and in 1983 it began implementing austerity policies to ensure the future of France’s currency in the European monetary system (Merkel 1993: 284 sqq.). In light of this experience, which remains traumatic for the PS to this day, the policies of the gauche plurielle under Prime Minister Lionel Jospin from 1997 to 2002 were surprisingly consistent with the PS’s programmatic aims. Jospin aspired to lead the most leftwing government in Europe. And indeed, his policies on the whole fi t a traditional social democratic pattern (Egle 2005), although differences between “socialist discourse” and “social-liberal praxis” were observable (Uterwedde 2001).
