Lionel Jospin has died. He was a good man, a less good politician; an able prime minister, a lackluster presidential candidate. He was among the most intelligent and impressive of the young socialists who came up under Mitterrand, rivaled only by his fellow Protestant and former boy scout leader Michel Rocard. Mitterrand, who detested Rocard, destroyed him, clearing a path for Jospin to rise to the top.
As prime minister (from 1997 to 2002 under the right-wing president Jacques Chirac), he fought for and won the 35-hour week, reduced the unemployment rate, expanded medical insurance coverage, introduced the PACS (civil marriage for gays), passed the law on male-female parity, oversaw the transition to the euro, and privatized a number of firms that had been nationalized under Mitterrand, moving the PS from le socialisme hard to something more like the ordoliberal and EU-compatible “économie sociale du marché,” an idea of Italo-German origin that he made current in French. His career ended abruptly in 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen unexpectedly beat him by a small margin in the first round of the presidential election. Reflecting the probity–some would say the rigidity–of his character, he drew the conclusion that he had no choice but to withdraw altogether from politics, which he promptly did.
Arguably, the PS would have been better off if he had been a leader with fewer scruples and more ambition, but then he would not have been Lionel Jospin. I met him several times and found him as austere as his reputation. He could be a brilliant orator, but he was withdrawn and, unlike many other politicians I’ve met, difficult to engage in conversation, at least among strangers, but when someone he knew joined the group he relaxed and became quite affable. At one conference, I sat next to him and watched as he took careful notes in four colors (using a complicated pen) in a Cartesian-ruled notebook of the sort commonly used in French schools. I wish he had been elected president in 1995; I wish he had remained in politics after his defeat in 2002. France would have been better off. May he rest in peace.
1 Comment
I used to say in the nineties that there were three types of politicians:
– those who could govern but couldn’t run, for example Balladur, Rocard and Jospin. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris come to mind in the USA,
– those who could run but couldn’t govern, for example Chirac or your current US fascist president.
– and, rarest, those who could run and could govern such as Mitterrand, Obama and Bill Clinton.
A point of clarification for US readers who might not be cognizant about French marriage and the PACS that Jospin introduced. The only valid marriage in France takes place in the townhall in front of the mayor. A few couples add a religious ceremony in some church, but this has no legal value whatsoever. The PACS that Jospin introduced is not gay marriage. It was derided as such by its conservative opponents including the Catholic Church (Eglise Pédophile de France in French) during the debate leading to its introduction, but this slander stopped within a year of its introduction due to the fact that it became clear that its huge success had nothing to do with gay couples. To give a numerical illustration, there were about 200 000 PACS last year (broadly as many as there were marriages), of which about 10 000 concerned same sex couples. In reality the PACS is an intermediate state between being married and not being married and provides intermediate legal and fiscal rights. Lastly, another socialist government legalized same-sex marriage a bit over 10 years ago under President Hollande. The Justice Minister who wrote that law was Christiane Taubira, formerly a French Guyana activist and a poet, who benefited from the same animal epithet as the Obamas did recently from your racist president for the same reason of course.