ABSTRACT
That 9.8 per cent and the support of 2.35 million voters in the June 1988 legislative elections could be viewed not as a triumph but as a ‘general setback’ confirmed the distance which the FN had come in half a decade. That the marginally better result of 11.2 per cent for the PCF could be described as a ‘relative recovery’ was comment on the political changes of the same period from a somewhat different perspective.1 The Socialists emerged from these elections without an overall majority but sufficiently strong to allow President Mitterrand to nominate in succession three Socialist Prime Ministers, Michel Rocard (1988-91), Edith Cresson (1991-92) and Pierre Bérégovoy (1992-93). There would be no return to the ‘Socialist experiment’ of 1981. Instead, Mitterrand’s second presidential term would see a quite different experiment in the politics of consensus, adumbrated in his presidential manifesto, the Lettre à tous les Français (Letter to All the French). This was marked by the minimising of ideological difference and an attempt to broaden the presidential majority towards the centre by offering ministries to a number of centrist figures (Jean-Marie Rausch, Lionel Stoléru, Jean-Pierre Soisson amongst others) and ‘non-political’ personalities (Bernard Kouchner, Bernard Tapie). The second Rocard government was a model of this new ouverture or ‘opening out’, with little over half of the posts held by Socialists and none at all by Communists.
