Lionel Jospin (born 12 July 1937) is a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France, during the third "cohabitation", under Jacques Chirac, from
1997 to 2002.
Jospin was the French Socialist Party candidate for President of France in the elections of 1995 and 2002. He was narrowly defeated in the
final runoff election by Jacques Chirac in 1995.
In 2002 he was stunningly eliminated in the first round after finishing behind both Chirac and the far-right candidate
Jean-Marie Le Pen, and immediately announced his retirement from politics, although he
briefly campaigned for the 2007 party nomination in the autumn of 2006.
Early Life
Lionel Jospin was born to a Protestant family in Meudon, a suburb of Paris. He studied at Institut d'études politiques de Paris and the École nationale d'administration (ENA). He was active in the UNEF students' union, protesting against the war
in Algeria (1954-62).
Member of National Assembly
After his graduation from the ENA in 1965, he entered the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs as secretary of Foreign Affairs. He became in charge of economical cooperation there, and worked with
Ernest-Antoine Seillière, future leader of the MEDEF employers' union.
Representative of a generation of left-wingers who criticized the old Socialist party SFIO, he joined a Trotskyist group, the
Internationalist Communist Organization (OCI) in the 1960s,
before entering the renewed Socialist Party (PS) in 1971. Integrating
François Mitterrand's circle, he became the second highest-ranking member of the
party in 1979, then its leader when Mitterrand was elected President of France in 1981. When Laurent Fabius was chosen as Prime minister, a rivalry appeared between these two political heirs of
Mitterrand. It broke out when they competed for the leadership of the 1986
legislative campaign.
In government
In 1988, after Mitterrand's re-election, he left the PS
leadership, and, though the President considered naming him Prime Minister, he was nominated Minister of Education. His rivalry with Fabius intensified. It caused an
internal crisis, notably during the Rennes Congress (1990), and damaged his relation
with Mitterrand. After the failure of the Socialist Party at the March 1992 local elections, Jospin was not included in the new
government formed by Pierre Bérégovoy.
As a member of the National Assembly, Jospin served first as a representative of Paris (1978-86), and then of Haute-Garonne
département (1986-88). Jospin lost his seat in the National Assembly in the
Socialists' landslide defeat in the 1993 legislative election and
announced his political retirement.
Finally, he came back and claimed the necessity to "take stock" of the mitterrandist inheritance so as to restore the
credibility of the Socialist Party. In this, he was selected to be the Socialist candidate for President in 1995, against the PS
leader Henri Emmanuelli. Following the Socialists' landslide defeats of 1992-1994,
Jospin was considered to have little chance of victory. But he did surprisingly well, leading the first round and losing only
very narrowly to Jacques Chirac in the final runnoff election. Despite defeat, his performance was seen to mark a revival of the
Socialists as a strong force in French politics and he returned to being the First Secretary of the party
He built a new coalition with the other left-wing parties: the French Communist
Party, the Greens, the Left Radical
Party and the dissident Citizen and Republican Movement. Two
years later, Chirac decided to call an early election for the National Assembly, hoping for a personal endorsement. But the move
backfired as the "Plural Left" obtained a parliamentary majority and Jospin became
Prime Minister.
Prime Minister
Despite his previous image as a rigid socialist, Jospin went on selling state-owned enterprises, lowered the VAT rate, income tax and company tax.
His government also introduced the 35-hour workweek, provided additional health
insurance for those on lowest incomes, promoted the representation of women in politics, and created the PACS - a civil partnership
or union between two people, whether of opposite genders or not. During his term, with the help of a favorable economic
situation, unemployment fell by 900,000. There were several women but no members of ethnic minorities in Jospin's government.
Jospin mostly steered clear of foreign policies during his ministerial positions. However, in 2000, he denounced
Hezbollah's "terrorist attacks against Israeli soldiers and
civilian populations", a position markedly more pro-Israel than that of president Chirac. On February 26, when visiting
Birzeit University, stones were thrown at him by Palestinian students, resulting in a minor injury.[1]
Jospin was a candidate in the presidential campaign of 2002. While
he appeared to have momentum in the early stages, the campaign came to be focused mainly on law-and-order issues, in which, it
was argued, the government had not achieved convincing results; this coincided with a strong focus of the media on a number of
egregious crime cases. The Prime Minister was also strongly criticized by the far left for his moderate economic policies, which,
they contended, were not markedly different from that of a right-wing government favoring businesses and free markets. Many
left-wing candidates contested the election, gaining small percentages of the vote in the first ballot, chipping away at Jospin's
support. As a result, Jospin narrowly polled in third place, behind Chirac and the Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, and thus did
not go through to the runoff second round of voting.
Following his defeat in April 2002, Jospin immediately declared his decision to leave politics and stepped down as Prime
Minister. He has since made episodic comments on current political affairs; for instance, he declared his opposition to
same-sex marriage. In 2005, he returned to the national political scene by campaigning
forcefully in favor of the proposed European
Constitution.
In autumn 2006, he declared he was "available" to be the Socialist candidate to the 2007 presidential election. However with Ségolène
Royal looking to win it, Jospin renounced his candidacy in order not to "divide the party".
Personal Life
On 5 June 2001, Lionel Jospin confessed before the Parliament that he had maintained links with a troskyist formation "in the 1960s" and had maintained links with Pierre
Lambert's party (the Internationalist Communist
Organization, OCI) after his entrance in the Socialist Party in 1971 [1]. Jospin was recruited into the OCI, when he was studying at the ENA, by
Boris Fraenkel, one of the founder of the OCI. He became an active member of the OCI after
quitting the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1968, under the pseudonym of "Michel." Although he declined to locate with precision
his rupture with the Lambertists, Le Monde newspaper alleged it was in 1986-87, a year
before becoming minister, while Lambert himself implicitly situated it in 1988 [1]. Jospin himself stated that he had only maintained "private relationship"
with OCI members after his entrance to the PS [2].
Jospin had concealed before this relationship with the OCI, which followed a strategy of entrism into other parties, and specifically denied it when asked about it later (he claimed in 1995 that this
rumor came from a confusion with his brother Olivier [1]). In 2001, investigative journalists and successive revelations by former Communist associates
showed him to have been lying, and he confessed the truth. Having lied hurt him politically more than having been in a cell of
the revolutionary left, and the political damage was not severe or long-lasting in France — where a number of left-wing and
right-wing politicians have been found to have had stints with radical groups in their youth, then later denying them or blaming
them on youthful indiscretion (see Occident,
Alain Madelin for instance).
Changes
- 20 October 1998 - Jean
Glavany succeeds Le Pensec as Minister of Agriculture and Forests.
- 2 November 1999 - Christian
Sautter succeeds Strauss-Kahn as Minister of Economy, Finance, and Industry.
- 28 March 2000 - Laurent
Fabius succeeds Sautter as Minister of Economy, Finance, and Industry. Jack Lang succeeds Allègre as Minister of National Education, while Roger-Gérard Schwartzenberg succeeds him as Minister of Research and Technology.
Catherine Tasca succeeds Trautmann as Minister of Culture and Communication. Michel Sapin succeeds Zuccarelli as Minister of Civil Service and Reform of the State.
- 29 August 2000 - Daniel
Vaillant succeeds Chevènement as Minister of the Interior. Jean-Jack
Queyranne succeeds Vaillant as Minister of Relations with Parliament.
- 18 October 2000 - Elisabeth Guigou succeeds Aubry as Minister of Employment and Solidarity. Marylise Lebranchu succeeds Guigou as Minister of Justice.
- 10 July 2001 - Yves
Cochet succeeds Voynet as Minister of Environment and Regional Planning.
- 25 February 2002 - François
Patriat succeeds Glavany as Minister of Agriculture and Forests.
References
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
See also
External links
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
