Word: mitterrand
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Next day Giscard took steps to bring some strange bedfellows into the Elysée Palace. He issued invitations to Communist Party Chief Georges Marchais and Socialist Leader François Mitterrand-top leftists who have not been inside the presidential palace since Giscard's election. They both agreed to come for consultations, as did Left Radical President Robert Fabre. Leading the rush to the Elysée were the heads of some of France's biggest trade unions, who had also been invited. They included André Bergeron of the 850,000-member Force Ouvri...
Meanwhile, leftist leaders were conducting a bitter postmortem. Mitterrand blamed the left's defeat on the Communists, who "did not hesitate to add their unceasing and violent attacks [against the Socialists] to those of the right." Later, in a closed session of his party's executive committee, he declared: "We did not obtain as many votes as the public opinion polls had predicted because Georges Marchais frightened the undecided voters who were getting ready to cast their ballots for us. They asked themselves how we could govern with the Communists...
...trouble with Mitterrand's last-ditch agreement was that it might well serve further to frighten an electorate that was already alarmed at the prospect of increased spending, taxes and inflation that a leftist government might bring. Moreover, many previously undecided voters, and moderate Socialists as well, were astonished at the news of Mitterrand's giveaway of ministries to the Communists. MITTERRAND YIELDS TO MARCHAIS'S DIKTAT, headlined the conservative daily Le Figaro. Premier Barre called the leftist accord a "masquerade," a "deception" and a "masterpiece of evasion...
Undaunted, Marchais and Mitterrand doggedly returned to the campaign trail in the week between the two rounds. Almost desperately, they escalated their campaign rhetoric in an effort to overcome the general sense of anticlimax that had settled over the country. "If the right wins." cried Mitterrand, "there is a great risk of creating in France a climate of the kind that precedes the rise of fascism." For his part, Marchais proclaimed that a victory for the government forces would mean that "tomorrow there will be even more daily difficulties and privation, layoffs and unemployment, authoritarianism and degradation in the quality...
...other hand, if the left should succeed in squeaking through, Giscard would be confronted by an intractable National Assembly, a clutch of Communists in his Cabinet and a hostile Premier-perhaps Francois Mitterrand himself-committed to reversing his most cherished policies. Measuring all the equations, conservative Economist Jean Fourastié recently provided the best summing up. Said he: "It will not be pleasant to hold power...