Although France did not face the challenge of integrating
two different systems into a single society, it encountered
many of the same economic and social problems as
its neighbor Germany. The policies adopted during the
early 1980s by the Socialist majority under President Mitterrand
failed to work, and within three years the Mitterrand
government returned some of the economy to private
enterprise. Mitterrand was able to win a second
seven-year term in the 1988 presidential election, but
France’s economic decline continued. In 1993, French
unemployment stood at 10.6 percent, and in the elections
in March of that year, the Socialists won only
28 percent of the vote while a coalition of conservative
parties won 80 percent of the seats in the National As-
sembly. The move to the right was strengthened when
the conservative mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, was
elected president in May 1995. The center-right government
remained in power as the new century opened.
As in Germany, resentment against foreign-born residents
was a growing political reality. Spurred by rising
rates of unemployment and large numbers of immigrants
from North Africa (often identified in the public mind
with terrorist actions committed by militant groups based
in the Middle East), many French voters gave their support
to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, which openly
advocated a restriction on all new immigration and limited
assimilation of immigrants already living in France.
World History
