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Lionel Jospin Lionel Jospin has white, curly hair and wears glasses. He's generally seen with a suit and a tie. Lionel Jospin (born 12 July 1937) is a French statesman. Lionel Jospin was educated at the cole nationale d'administration. Entering the French Socialist Party in 1971, he became the leader of the party when Franois Mitterrand was elected president in 1981, then minister of education between 1988 and 1992. Member of the National Assembly, first as a representative of Paris (1978-86), then of Haute-Garonne (1986-88), he was defeated in 1993. In 1995, he lost the presidential election against Jacques Chirac, but became Prime Minister in 1997 when Chirac called an early election for the National Assembly — and his party lost. Despite his previous image as a rigid socialist, he went on selling state participations, lowered the VAT rate, income tax and company tax. His government also introduced the 35-hour week, provided additional health insurance for the poorest, promoted the representation of women in politics, and created the PACS (a civil partnership or union between two people, whether of opposite genders or not). During his term, with the help of a favorable economic situation, unemployment fell by 900,000. Jospin was a candidate in the presidential campaign of 2002. While he appeared to have momentum in the early stages, the campaign came to be focused mainly on law-and-order issues, in which, it was argued, the government had not achieved convincing results; this coincided with a strong focus of the media on a number of egregious crime cases. The prime minister was also strongly criticized by the far left for his moderate economic policies, which, they contended, was not sensibly different from that of a right-wing government favoring businesspeople and free markets. Many left-wing candidates contested the election, gaining small percentages of the vote in the first ballot, chipping away at Jospin's support. As a result, Jospin narrowly polled in third place, behind Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, and thus did not go through to the run-off second round of voting. The story of the campaign is told in the documentary Comme un coup de tonnerre. Following his defeat in April 2002, he declared his decision to leave politics. He has since made episodic comments on current political affairs; for instance, he declared his opposition to same-sex marriage. Trotskyist Past During his school years in the 1960s, Jospin joined the Internationalist Communist Organization, a secretive group dedicated to an unreconstructed Trotskyist program of overthrowing France's parliamentary democracy for the "dictatorship of the proletariat". He remained active in it during the 1970s while also serving as a trusted member of the Socialist Party. Jospin concealed this relationship, and specifically denied it when asked about it later. In 2001, investigative journalists and successive revelations by former Communist associates showed him to have been lying, and he confessed the truth. Having lied hurt him politically more than having been in a cell of the revolutionary left, but the political damage was not severe or long-lasting in France — various other left-wing or right-wing politicians having had stints with radical groups in their youth, then later denying them or blaming them on youthful indiscretion (see Occident, Alain Madelin for instance). See also: Changes External links Jospin, Lionel Jospin Jospin
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