The most common politically-important minorities are racial, religious,
ethnic or linguistic groups in a society who are seen as suffering across a broad
spectrum of disadvantages and needing special legal protection and positive
discrimination oraffirmative action. In many societies sexual minorities
have become increasingly vocal, particularly since the 1960s (seehomosexu-
ality). In all these cases what is at stake is not so much the actual arithmetical
minority status, but the fact that the group in question is cut off from, and
usually subordinate to, a dominant set of interests against which it needs
protection. Indeed it would be only partially absurd to regard a group which
was, as it happened, in a majority in the population as being nevertheless, a
minority in this sense. Occasionally one finds women in general described as a
political minority, even though they may be statistically in a majority, because
of the way in which they have been historically treated as subordinate to males
or lacking full rights.
A related use of minority is to refer to a minority party, or minority public
opinion, where the difference with the overall culture is a major ideological
contrast, and not merely a set of specific and contingent policy disagreements.
In terms of debates about voting systems, for example, such political
minorities are also often thought of as deserving special legal protection to
ensure their views are represented in legislatures.
Mitterrand
Franc ̧ois Mitterrand became president of France in 1981, and was re-elected to
a second seven-year term in 1988. He was the first socialist to hold the
presidency in theFifth Republic. Born in 1916, Mitterrand was captured
during the early stages of the Second World War, but escaped and returned to
France where he worked in the resistance and prisoner of war movements, for
which he was later decorated. He served in various junior ministerial posts
during some of theFourth Republicgovernments, but the creation of the
Fifth Republic, initially under the firm control of theGaullists, removed him
from office for many years. Mitterrand spent this time working to overcome
the main barrier to political success for the left in France, which was its
fragmentation. The Parti Communiste Franc ̧ais (PCF) was bitterly
opposed to the non-communist left, and was generally the mostStalinistof
the Western European communist parties, and the non-communist left was
itself divided into a set of rival groups. Mitterrand’s major achievement was
welding these groups into onesocial democraticparty, theParti Socialiste
(PS)in 1971, though he had earlier been the candidate for the presidency of an
all-party left-wing coalition. After that he pioneered an alliance with the PCF,
in which the PS rapidly became the dominant member, leading to their success
in the legislative elections following his election to the presidency in 1981. For
Mitterrand