Lionel Jospin: a French Socialist in London
ChIrac, Mitterrand and Jospin.
Lionel Jospin, one of the big figures in French Socialist Party politics, has died aged 88. He was a leading figure in the long domination of French politics by the Socialist Party, following the 14 year reign of François Mitterrand as President 1981-1997. Jospin became the leading figure on the centre- Left during the period of cohabitation under Jacques Chirac.
While in Britain the Labour Party and in Germany the Social Democrats became important parties of government from the middle of the last century, the French Socialists were hampered by the mass working class and peasant support for the French Communist Party, which took its line from Moscow and faithfully followed every twist and turn of Stalin who hated social democratic reformism with far greater venom and organisational energy than fascism.
Jospin had the elite republican education — Sciences Po, ENA — that postwar France had installed to produce the men and women who could lead the country. But he devoted his life to challenging the lies of Stalinism. He acted as general secretary of the Socialist Party under Mitterrand and then, when the Socialists won a majority in the National Assembly in the era of Jacques Chirac as president, he became Prime Minister from 1997 to 2002.
He came to London in 1998 at the invitation of the new Labour government. Tony Blair had gone to Paris after winning his landslide to lead Britain in 1997. He sought to forge political links with fellow democratic left leaders in Europe, especially the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, to try and fashion a pan-European modern social democracy. In Britain it was called The Third Way. In Germany, die Neue Mitte (The New Middle).
Blair spoke in Paris to the National Assembly soon after entering Downing Street. Speaking in French, the young Labour Prime Minister had a big impact.
His vision of a reformist social democracy — working through the European Union to create a new politics of inclusion, workers’ rights, and education for all — resonated on the Left in France after the long Thatcher and Major era.
Jospin was invited to give the return speech in London. I was a minister at the Foreign Office at the time, working on building links between the Labour government and European sister parties. I asked to see a copy of Jospin’s speech ahead of delivery. Jospin had trained as a diplomat after ENA, so spoke perfectly good English.
I told the French ambassador, a member of the Socialist Party, that given Blair had spoken in French, the least Jospin could do was speak English in his keynote address. He did so professionally until it it came to questions from the floor. The journalist David Goodhart asked Jospin: “Is France on the ‘Third Way?’” The concept was a taboo in France as it was associated with Bill Clinton. To the horror of the French les Anglo-Saxons had come up with a modern political construction that everyone was talking about.
Jospin gulped and said: “Sur le troisième voie je vais vous répondre en français” (“On the Third Way I will reply to you in French”). Jospin was terrified that if he started discussing the Anglo-Saxon Third Way concept in English at a time when it was being attacked by communists, Trotskyists, and statist socialists in France, he might get a nuance wrong. It was a telling moment, reminding us of the enduring influence of the French far-Left.
Jospin had a fine brain and as prime minister introduced the 35 hour weeks and other progressive measures in France. He was an intellectual in politics: honest and direct but unable to communicate with non-political citizens in the way François Mitterrand could. Gerhard Schröder told me Jospin was the most difficult person he talked to among the club of European government leaders of the day. Today, 25 years later, we still have elected leaders like Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer who were experts in their professional fields — banking and the law respectively — but have found it difficult to be effective politicians who can communicate with voters.
This was revealed with a dreadful clarity for Lionel Jospin when as Prime Minister of France he decided to run for President in 2002. I recorded the following entry in the daily diary I kept as an MP and Minister.
“Sunday 21 April 2002
A political earthquake across the Channel. At 6.45pm Francois Nordmann, the former Swiss ambassador in London, phones up from Geneva. The Swiss television are announcing that Jean-Marie Le Pen has beaten Lionel Jospin into third place and the next round of the presidential election in France will be between Chirac and the racist anti-semitic far right Le Pen. I don’t want to believe this. But exit polls in France are reliable. The result will be announced in twenty minutes’ time so I phone up Jonathan Powell to tell him to tell Tony. He can’t believe it either.
“It is the collapse of the old statist left. Nothing faces us in Europe now but a disintegrating, chaotic incoherent set of right wing governments that do not know what to do. I am angry and cross. Jospin has not had a bad government but he has tried to placate vested interests, and bring together coalitions of support and not be a strong leader with a dynamic new project to modernise and reform France. The left must be reformist or it will die. And all the people he tried to please have turned away from him and voted for Trotskyists and Communists and Greens and mad Workerists. It is a repudiation of Europe and, alas, an endorsement of racism. It is also a massive vote against an open economy and again Jospin pandered endlessly to the anti-trade protectionists.”
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