The left’s contender

Date: 08/05/1997

ON 11 December 1994, just after Jacques Delors stunned France by announcing that he would not be the Socialist candidate in the coming presidential election, a thoughtful Lionel Jospin was riding through Paris in the back of a car.

A middle-aged woman tapped on his window as the car stopped at a traffic light. “Are you going to stand?” she asked. The owl-like Jospin looked startled for a moment. Then he tossed back his unruly white curls and roared with laughter.

The French left was in tatters after Delors' decision. For several weeks, the Socialist Party, eager to find a credible replacement for François Mitterrand as the ailing president neared the end of his second term, had been riding high in the polls with Delors as its virtual candidate.

The idea that Jospin could replace the former European Commission president seemed almost ludicrous. In elections the year before, he had lost his parliamentary seat and announced he was stepping down from public life.

At best, it looked as though he was starting his traversée du désert, the crossing of the wilderness which has marked the careers of leading French politicians since Charles de Gaulle retired from the political scene after World War II until his dramatic return in 1958. Cynics now describe Jospin's political exile as “crossing the sandpit”.

Three weeks after Delors left his political allies in disarray, Jospin decided to bid for the Socialist candidacy.

He had the whole Socialist Party apparatus - fresh from knifing former Prime Minister Michel Rocard in the back - against him. His opponents included a former foreign minister and another former prime minister but, for the first time, the choice was up to the grass roots.

Worried that his opponent, the uncharismatic Henri Emmanuelli, would fail miserably, the militants chose Jospin by a handsome 65&percent; in February 1995.

Although he had only a few weeks to put together a campaign, Jospin confounded all the pollsters by leading the first round of voting, pushing the eventual winner, the Gaullist Jacques Chirac - who had spent 19 years preparing his bid - into an uncomfortable second place.

Jospin's performance was rewarded five months later by his election to the post of Socialist Party first secretary, recognition that he was France's leading left-wing politician.

Things have not been easy since then. With the right commanding an 80&percent; majority in the national assembly, the left's ideas have taken a back seat. It was only when Chirac announced the dissolution of parliament and new elections late last month, 11 months before the end of the parliamentary mandate, that Jospin was once again galvanised into action.

One cartoonist had him telling Chirac: “Thank you, I had run out of things to say.”

With opinion polls predicting a right-wing victory, but often by a close margin, the 59-year-old Jospin now believes he may be France's next prime minister.

His 1995 campaign flair has returned. More at ease with the ordinary voter than with his Socialist colleagues - beside whom he is usually photographed with a permanent frown - a smiling and jovial Jospin is now spending his Sundays talking to shoppers in street markets.

If the French voters do propel Jospin to the prime minister's office at the Hôtel Matignon, they will be choosing a man who came late to mainstream politics and has had only brief ministerial experience.

A trained economist, his early days were spent in the corridors of power at economic summits.

Although he describes himself as an atheist, Jospin has most of the austere attributes of the French Protestant. His father once considered becoming a pastor but instead opted for teaching, where he specialised in tutoring the handicapped and disadvantaged.

During their summer holidays, the Jospin children would spend their time at camps organised for the children their father supervised, giving this otherwise middle-class family an insight into the lives of the less fortunate.

The young Jospin was known at school more for his prowess at basketball than in the classroom. His mother tells of torn clothes from fights on his way home from school.

Nevertheless, he made it to two of France's élite grandes écoles, the Paris political science school, and the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, or ENA, the civil service school whose very existence would be threatened by a left-wing victory.

Between the two, the young Jospin did his military service attached to an armoured unit in Germany. There, as a sub-lieutenant and despite militant personal opposition to the Algerian war, he trained on half-tracks for a possible mission in North Africa.

True to a fast-disappearing notion of service to the state which was once the rule among French public servants, Jospin says: “It would have been painful because of my ideas, but if I had had to fight in that war, I would have done.”

After ENA, Jospin went to the foreign ministry's economic affairs department, from where he travelled to meetings of institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as well the European Community.

This job, he says, “taught me how to negotiate between states. Diplomacy also taught me good manners and polished me”.

It was, however, an uncomfortable young diplomat who watched the student riots of May 1968 from the gilded salons of the Quai d'Orsay. Encouraged in his left-wing views by a colleague, Pierre Joxe (who went on to be interior and defence minister under Mitterrand), Jospin decided to leave the foreign ministry for a university post teaching economics in 1970.

The following year, he joined the new-style Socialist Party fashioned by Mitterrand, and Jospin met the future president for the first time. It was the beginning of a love-hate relationship that was to end in estrangement.

Jospin was Mitterrand's choice to take over the running of the Socialist Party just before the latter's first successful presidential campaign in 1981. When a Socialist was needed for a television debate with the then Communist leader Georges Marchais, Mitterrand sent Jospin, saying he was “the only one who, if the Communists started pounding the table, would not hide underneath it”.

Now, Jospin is talking to the Communists again, this time about an electoral pact that could see Communist ministers in the government if he wins the election. It is in part to gain their loyalty that Jospin has started to question how seriously governments should take the infamous budgetary conditions for joining EMU.

While continuing to favour single currency membership for France, he has used this new position to outflank the right. He can argue that no further budget-cutting measures are needed this year even if the budget deficit looks like edging over 3&percent; of gross domestic product.

Apart from this, victory for Jospin in the election would not spark a shift in the country's policy on Europe.

Jospin joined the government in 1988, becoming education minister at the age of 50. Nicknamed 'Jospinator' by students, he pushed the annual education budget up from 30 to 40 billion ecu, outstripping defence spending.

But Jospin was an angry man from the day in 1984 when Laurent Fabius, almost ten years his junior, was named prime minister. This anger often showed through and Edith Cresson, in her brief spell as prime minister, told Mitterrand that Jospin was “unbearable”. When Cresson made way for Pierre Bérégovoy in 1982, Jospin left the government.

Then, in 1994, came the revelation that Mitterrand had been friendly with René Bousquet, the former collaborationist Vichy police chief responsible for the wartime deportation of thousands of Jews to Nazi Germany.

“We could,” said Jospin, “have dreamt of a more simple and straightforward itinerary for the man who was the leader of the French left in the Seventies and Eighties.” Others in the Socialist Party sought excuses.

Jospin rarely lifts the veil on himself. Recent remarks that he smoked hashish as a young man prompted more comment abroad than in France. He likes to quote the writer and politician André Malraux: “A man is not what he hides. He is what he does.”

Now, as Jospin limbers up for a fight, some say the austere exterior hides a man brimming with confidence. “Since he took over the Socialist Party,” says one long-time friend, “he has always believed there is no one better. He thinks he just needs to be in the right place at the right time.”