the Workers’ International). In 1920 the majority of the SFIO left the
organization to form theParti Communiste Franc ̧ais (PCF), and for most
of the next 50 years the latter was the dominant left-wing party in France,
although it only participated in government in the immediate post-war period.
The SFIO formed a part of the government much more often, and one of its
leaders, Guy Mollet, was actually prime minister, in 1956–57, of the longest-
livedFourth Republicgovernment.
The electoral dominance of theGaullistsand Independent Republicans, on
the right and in the centre, during the first two decades of theFifth Republic
made clear the need for arealignmentof the left (seeFrench party system).
First, in 1965, the SFIO joined with Radical Socialists and the Convention of
Republican Institutions (CIR), whose leader was Franc ̧oisMitterrand, to
form the Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left (FGDS); Mitterrand
became its president. In the 1965 presidential elections, when Mitterrand was
the candidate of the FGDS, and at National Assembly elections in 1967, the
new alliance appeared to be making electoral progress, before the Paris uprising
of students and workers in May 1968 led to a set-back in the following month.
Certainly the intention of the SFIO was to create a new and united democratic
socialist party, but when the new Parti Socialiste was actually established, in
1969, Mitterrand’s CIR did not join. Eventually, however, in 1971, the CIR
became part of the Parti Socialiste, and Mitterrand became its first secretary.
The new party spent most of the 1970s engaged in electoral co-operation with
the PCF, even signing a common programme with them in 1972, and this
alignment very nearly gave Mitterrand, as candidate for virtually the whole of
the French left, victory over Vale ́ry Giscard d’Estaing in the 1974 presidential
election. By the mid-1970s the Parti Socialiste had clearly overtaken the PCF
in popularity, and the stresses caused by this contributed to the communists
breaking off co-operation just before the assembly elections of 1978, almost
certainly preventing the left from gaining an assembly majority.
The Parti Socialiste continued to grow, and increasingly has come to
resemble a party from the tradition of Europeansocial democracy. Mean-
while the electoral popularity of the PCF plummeted. In 1981 and 1988
Mitterrand won presidential election victories, and during the 1980s the Parti
Socialiste was only out of government for the two years of the socialist
president’s cohabitation with a centre-right government. In the early
1990s, with the Parti Socialiste under threat from renewed electoral co-
operation between the Gaullist Rassemblement pour la Re ́publique and the
Giscardian Union pour la De ́mocratie Franc ̧aise, much interest within the
party focused on the succession to the ageing Mitterrand. The party did return
to power later in the 1990s, but existed in a system of ‘cohabitation’ with a
Gaullist president, Jacques Chirac. In what was seen by many as a humiliation,
its candidate in the presidential election of 2002, the incumbent prime
Parti Socialiste