Word: mitterrand
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Kohl has been the perpetually shrinking statesman. Despite his formidable physical size, the Bonn leader has been derided for a political ineptitude that has time and again diminished his stature in West Germany and among Europe's leaders. Lacking the mettle of Margaret Thatcher, the imperial hauteur of Francois Mitterrand, and the wiles of his rival and coalition partner, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Kohl has made his mark as the Continent's veteran political survivor...
...usual last week. In Moscow Alan Greenspan, guru of Republican capitalism and chairman of the Federal Reserve, tutored top Soviet officials in remedial economics. In Hungary the country's ruling party shed its Communist label. And in Caracas ranking socialist leaders of the First and Third Worlds -- President Francois Mitterrand of France, 72, on a tour of Latin America, and President Carlos Andres Perez of Venezuela, 66 -- agreed on the virtues of the free market...
...Mitterrand's conversion came early in his presidency, during the mid-1980s. His initial attempts to bash the private sector through a program of nationalization and state planning, coupled with a wealth tax, drove capital out of the country and cost workers their jobs. But he learned to make compromises with conservative politicians and alliances with industrialists to promote investment and stimulate employment...
Perez's odyssey has been much more dramatic. Not only is he changing his habits of thinking and governing, but he is trying to change the way his country develops. Like Mitterrand, Perez has been a socialist since his youth. He is still vice president, under Willy Brandt, of the Socialist International. During an earlier presidential term in the '70s, he nationalized Venezuela's oil industry, slapped controls on prices and interest rates, mandated wage boosts, increased regulation of agriculture and made government-subsidized loans to low-income city dwellers, peasants and small businessmen. Perez personified the socialist conviction that...
During the next ten years, Perez regarded as proteges two young fellow socialists -- Felipe Gonzalez Marquez, who became Prime Minister of Spain in 1982, and Alan Garcia Perez, who has been President of Peru since 1985. Much like his neighbor Mitterrand, Gonzalez has become an apostle of "market socialism," and he is virtually assured of re-election when Spaniards go to the polls later this month. Garcia, by contrast, stuck with policies similar to those Perez had followed in his own first term. Peru now faces economic disaster, and Garcia is almost certain to be defeated next year. After...