France's New Face at the Top
VALLS-RUSSELL, JANICE
REPLACING ROCARD France's New Face at the Top BY JANICE VALLS-RUSSELL Paris When François Mitterrand celebrated the 10th anniversary of his election as President this past May 10, Prime...
...Ironically, the incidents occurred as Parliament was discussing a bill on urban renovation...
...REPLACING ROCARD France's New Face at the Top BY JANICE VALLS-RUSSELL Paris When François Mitterrand celebrated the 10th anniversary of his election as President this past May 10, Prime Minister Michel Rocard marked his own three years in office in a lower key...
...French schools, she says, should form closer relationships with industry, as in Germany...
...Youngsters from depressed suburbs who had been invited to follow the debate came away saying they were "disgusted" by the deputies' "abstract approach" and "evident ignorance of what life in those suburbs is really like...
...To others, she is an old-fashioned "interventionist," closer in spirit to Mitterrand's first Socialist team with its Communist members than to its more moderate successors...
...Businessmen insist the tax adds to the costs of production and creates a disincentive to hire additional workers...
...Commentator Jean-Marie Colombani questions the sincerity of the statement...
...In the process, Colombani warns, Mitterrand may further damage PS chances to secure a National Assembly majority in the 1993 Parliamentary elections...
...As the birth rate drops, the working population ages and the elderly live longer, the program is being increasingly strained A government white paper proposes that people be made to contribute for 41 years instead of the current 37 before they become entitled to full coverage...
...The post is reputed to make or wreck political careers, because the farmers' lobby is so strong here...
...That may make longterm sense...
...Moreover, many have been shocked by the President's vindictiveness...
...A lone ranger among his political compatriots, Rocard's popularity in France almost equals the President's...
...He has been unsullied by the recent bribery allegations that have spattered several leading PS figures, including Justice Minister Henri Nallet, Mitterrand's campaign manager in the 198 8 election...
...This became especially noticeable once the Gulf War ended...
...Men turn to women, Cresson is prone to say, "when the situation is impossible...
...Its hostility appears to reflect a wider apprehension over her resolute opinions, although key ministries remain in the same hands and little has changed...
...In May, the total number of persons unemployed rose to over 2.6 million, representing 9.5 per cent of the labor force...
...its leader, Pierre Méhaignerie, accuses her of being "sectarian" and "lacking intellectual rigor"—harsh words from the mouth of a usually mild man...
...Cresson concedes, however, that "vituperating Japan or Germany doesn't help: We must face up to the fact that our economy has structural problems...
...And her meetings with its representatives certainly were very tense...
...A 16 -year-old North African boy died while in police custody, apparently of a heart attack brought on by a severe bout of asthma, but the autopsy showed signs ofblows...
...Differences over pay increases contributed to a rash of strikes involving policemen, nurses, aircraft pilots, and subway workers...
...Free-trading Centrists wince when Cresson describes Japan as "the economic enemy" of America and Europe, bent on "conquering the world" from behind "hermetically closed trade barriers...
...Among these she lists a cumbersome bureaucracy, overcautious banks and businesses, and an educational system that is good but that does not produce enough skilled workers or engineers...
...France'ssmall but influential Union of the Center (UDC) has said it considers her appointment purely decorative...
...But unless Cresson can show there is more to her than crisp efficiency, people will miss Rocard's attempts to reconcile economic and social affairs —the combination that helped make him one of France's most popular Socialists...
...Five days later Rocard resigned (or "was resigned," as his friends say...
...For the moment, though, France's pension program is of greater concern...
...The uneasy truth is that integration will be difficult so long as unemployment remains high and mostly unskilled immigrants continue to enter France at the rate of approximately 100,000 a year...
...deputies came last, along with prostitutes...
...In addition, fresh disturbances broke out in overcrowded run-down Parisian suburbs with large immigrant populations...
...That is somewhat unfair to Rocard, under whom she served as Minister of European Affairs until she resigned in October 1990, claiming "nobody wanted to listen to me...
...His replacement, Edith Cresson, is the first woman to hold this country'stop Cabinet job...
...Socialists and non-Socialists alike agree that if there is anyone in France untainted by power, it is Rocard—a rare compliment...
...The Japanese government, not surprisingly, officially objected to this statement, made the day the Prime Minister was appointed...
...President Mitterrand offered little short-term comfort when he urged Edith Cresson to give the country a "new élan" and declared, "It is only if we limber up our economy that we can hope to improve welfare...
...Support from the Communists, or at least an absence of overt opposition, is essential if Cresson's government is to survive in Parliament and in the street...
...Cresson wants the French economy to "muscle up" and grow as strong as Germany's by the time the EC becomes a single open market in 1993...
...He accuses the President of trying "to make sure the public forgets Rocard" so that he can promote his "dauphin," former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius...
...To some, Madame le Premier Ministre sounds like an economic de Gaulle...
...Social reform is vital as well...
...That walkout capped a fortnight of unusual turbulence following Cresson's appointment...
...The two men have been rivals ever since Rocard challenged his colleague's leadership of the Socialist Party (PS) in 1979...
...Mitterrand has nonetheless said that Rocard "would serve France in years to come," a seemingly grudging admission that his younger competitor may be the PS candidate for the Elysée Palace office in 1995...
...The present Communist leadership disliked Rocard's basically Centrist thrust, and thus adopted a cautious wait-andsee stance...
...A recent poll revealed that the bulk of the voters already favor the Center-Right...
...The French, she notes, spend twice as much on medicine as other EC citizens...
...She accepts that the European Community (EC) will have to suppress quotas on car imports but insists on a delay: "Japan has already wiped out America's automobile industry, I don't want the same to happen in Europe...
...Cresson, whose stress on economic competitiveness augurs poorly, attributes the welfare hemorrhage to overly generous handouts and medical self-indulgence...
...Since May 15, he has tried to take credit for one of the departed Prime Minister's most delicate achievements: the special statute that three years ago put an end to ethnic disturbances in New Caledonia, a French dominion in the Pacific...
...During the last week of May, the railway workers went on strike to protect their own generous pension plan...
...Cresson's rise has now given the UDC a fresh excuse for coolness...
...Indeed, the average French person's predominant worry today is the financial drain of the country's Social Security and pension systems...
...Aggrieved rank-and-file Socialists recall that when Mitterrand was first elected President, he wanted to lower the retirement age...
...Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...
...His quiet handling of public affairs in Mitterrand's aloof, frequently adverse shadow earned him the people's respect...
...Indignation stirred by the death focused on the need for revising police procedure...
...Slim and youthful for her 57 years, with an angularly attractive face but a sharp voice, Cresson dismisses most criticism as male chauvinism, a prejudice she learned to deal with after being named Minister of Agriculture in 1981...
...Support sagged only during the brief strikes that peppered his term in office, and the President's tendency to side with the protesting nurses and students did not help...
...A special income tax introduced this year is earmarked for Social Security, which is otherwise financed largely by the self-employed and by employers...
...Recent opinion polls have found that the French in general consider their deputies "remote" or "apt to put personal careers before the public good...
...With previous surveys showing Mitterrand and Rocard to be much more popular than their party, Centrist deputies have lately been inclined to withdraw from their alignment with the Socialist government...
...In a ranking of professions according to public usefulness, nurses and teachers placed at the top...
...She was, in fact, one of the cooks who helped concoct the Leftist electoral alliance that brought Mitterrand to power...
...To this end, she has put Finance Minister Pierre Bérégovoy in charge of a "superministry" that includes four juniorministries (trade, industry, economic development, telecommunications...
...Having herself moved from agriculture to become the Minister of Tourism and Trade, and then of Trade and Industry, she is keenly aware of the need for interdepartmental coordination...
...on one occasion she was even briefly kidnapped...
Vol. 74 • July 1991 • No. 8
