Abstract
In 1997 the French Socialist party, in alliance with the small parties of the Communists, Verts (left-wing ecologists), Citizens' Movement, and Radical Socialists (the so-called plural left), won a narrow victory defeating the President's party, the failing government and its beleaguered prime minister. In June, the left formed a government under its leader, Lionel Jospin, and included ministers from all of the formations. Its victory was unexpected as in 1993 the Socialist party had suffered a near obliteration and the conservative right had won a landslide, but it had revived at the 1995 presidential elections, when it ran Lionel Jospin, and steadily—though not spectacularly—revived after that. However, the victory in 1997 was more the result of the conservative right's divisions, an unpopular government, the hostility of the Front National, and the spectacular miscalculations of the neo-Gaullist President Jacques Chirac than to the prowess of the renewed Socialist party.
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