the Trotskyists while a young politician came to
light. His education was solid, a graduate of the
prestigious École Nationale d’Administration, he
joined Mitterrand’s Socialist Party in 1971 and
became education minister under Mitterrand.
Later, however, he distanced himself, disturbed by
the prevailing corruption that also enveloped
President Chirac, allegedly, during the years when
he was a mayor of Paris. Though a Socialist, he
began a programme of privatisation of state indus-
tries such as Air France and French Telecom. Over
the five years of the Chirac–Jospin coalition there
had been a number of achievements to their credit.
There were improvements in welfare provisions,
the government provided additional health bene-
fits for the poorest people. Notable was legislation
allowing gay couples to form a union, the Civil
Solidarity Pact, another reform was to encourage
women’s parity in politics; the most notable legis-
lation was to reduce the working week from 39 to
35 hours to provide jobs for the young. Jospin
gave way to the opposition from trade unions and
workers who went on massive strikes of the public
services in 1999, 2000 and 2001 defending their
pensions, jobs, wages and working conditions.
Little of a reform agenda was achieved, though
France urgently needed to move to more flexible
labour, lower taxation, and an easing of the future
pension liabilities. The need for this was masked by
the success of the French economy during the ear-
lier years of his government until it, too, slowed.
Unlike in Germany, the economy grew robustly
and over one million jobs were created.
In 2002 Jospin campaigned against Chirac for
the presidency. The results sent shock waves
through France. After the first round he was just
beaten into third place by the extreme right-
winger Jean-Marie Le Pen. The split in his social-
ist support, the anti-immigrant vote for Le Pen
and low voter turnout were responsible for the
disaster. To demonstrate their opposition to Le
Pen, the socialists had now no choice but to back
Chirac, the lesser evil, in the second round. This
enabled Chirac to win by a landslide, 82 per cent
of the vote. In June 2002 at the elections for
the National Assembly, Chirac’s party, the Union
for the Presidential Majority, and his newly
appointed prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin
received solid support, winning 399 of 577 seats.
The French electorate had opted for change, but
were they really ready for it?
The French people in the new millennium dis-
played a growing disinterest in national politics.
In the first round of the presidential elections in
April 2002 three out of ten did not bother to vote
and Le Pen received the protest anti-immigration
vote of 16.9 per cent. The ‘respectable’ parties
attracted less than half the voters. The people
were worried above all about the threat of crime
especially in the crowded city suburbs. The eco-
nomy, which did well under Jospin, is slowing.
Delivering one of the best health services in the
world and the most generous pension rights,
France is also over taxed, the population is
ageing, and painful change is all but inevitable.
France until the turn of the millennium, however,
benefited from the booming American economy.
Even so unemployment remained high at 9 per
cent. The reforms that need to be tackled are: to
reduce the government’s still extensive control of
state industries; to reduce the pension burden,
which is potentially ruinous; and to cut back the
state’s take of the portion of the wealth produced
by the nation which requires high taxation and
dampens enterprise. Prime Minister Jean-Pierre
Raffarin made a cautious start avoiding the
sudden way reform was attempted and aban-
doned in 1995. Even though all that was pro-
posed was that public sector workers and teachers
should, like the private sector, have to work for
forty years for a full pension, two and a half years
longer than hitherto, and the change would not
take effect for five years, it was enough to bring
to the streets new waves of strikes in the spring
and summer of 2003 with the unions leading the
protest. But given the substantial majority in the
National Assembly, the government is likely to
win through. Meantime, despite all the allega-
tions of corruption in earlier years, Chirac enjoyed
unprecedented popular approval in 2003 for
leading the opposition to the US–British deter-
mination to war against Saddam Hussein. With its
veto power as a threat, Chirac, supported by
Schröder and Putin, was able to frustrate Anglo-
American diplomatic efforts to win the support of
the UN for the war in Iraq. This plunged Franco-