Vanished Supremacy: the Socialists Under Mitterrand and After

Abstract

Of the twenty-one years after 1981, France had a Socialist president for fourteen (1981–95) and a Socialist-led government for fifteen (1981–86, 1988–93, and 1997–2002). Few European parties of the Left enjoyed office for so long over the same period. Yet the record of the Parti Socialiste (PS) is also one of relative failure because it has not established the secure electoral bases of a north European social democratic party. While the PS vote in the 1980s was higher than the West European average for such parties, at 35 per cent against 32, it fell well below it, at 25 per cent against 31.6, in the following decade (Gallagher, Laver, and Mair, 2001, p. 204). In the last national election before 2000, the vote shares of other social democratic parties varied from 33 per cent (Austria) or 37 per cent (Sweden) to well over 40 per cent in the UK, Germany, Greece, or Portugal. For France’s PS, the figure was 23.8 per cent (25.5 per cent with allies), in an election that it won; only the Italian, Belgian and Irish parties were weaker (Chiche and Reynié, 2002).