An end to the Socialist dream

POLITICAL labels, while sometimes useful to observers, are misleading at the best of times. In France after seven weeks of the Prime Ministership of Laurent Fabius pundits are still casting around hopelessly for a tag with which to pin down this brilliant young technocrat. "Pragmatist", "liberal", "Reaganite" are amongst a bewildering variety already tried, but so agile has the 38-year-old premier been so far that none of these labels has served to explain away his attitudes and policies.
Speaking in a well received first television interview, the new Prime Minister described himself as an advocate of "modern socialism" and went on to sketch such an ideology as encompassing the notion of society working to reduce social inequalities.
Hitherto it has seemed that the "modern" tag has been more apt than the "socialist". Since his appointment by President Mitterrand in the hectic days of July, M Fabius has cut a careful image as a thoroughly modern man in stark contrast with his predecessor, Pierre Mauroy.
Election promises and traditional socialist policies have been quietly abandoned in the wake of the change at the Matignon. The first sign of this was the departure of the Communists from the Government soon after M Fabius's appointment. Tax changes are now in the pipeline which will reduce income tax by S per cent in direct contravention of the traditional socialist manifesto commitment to indirect taxation. Only last week the Government swept aside talk of nationalising Creusot-Loire, the beleaguered engineering giant which has been forced to call in the receiver threatening thousands of jobs. Retrenchment and austerity are the orders of the day, M Fabius stressed in his television interview.
However, perhaps the most symbolic retreat by the Fabius Government so far has been over the future of France's private schools. In his election manifesto of 1981, Francois Mitterand made a clear promise to set up a single, unified system of lay education.
Once elected the President and his Education Minister, Alain Savary, went about this task with gusto. However they ran straight into total resistance from the private schools which make up about 15 per cent of the education sector, and from the Catholic Church which runs all but a tiny number of these schools. This opposition culminated in a demonstration in Paris in June in which 1.5 million parents, teachers and other interested groups, including leaders of most of the main right-wing opposition parties, protested at the Savary schools bill which was then being discussed by the Parliament.
President Mitterrand reacted to this show of force by withdrawing the controversial proposals and promising a referendum on the subject. This prompted the resignation of M Savary, who was quickly followed into the political wilderness by the entire Mauroy cabinet.
Opposition in the Senate from the dominant right-wing opposition who feared that the referendum proposal was an underhand way of extending presidential powers forced NI Mitterrand to let the matter drop, but he promised a new education bill within a matter of weeks.
Expectations were high
amongst opponents of President Mitterrand of continuing the prolonged conflict over private schools — the so-called "schools war". The new Minister for Education, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, was well known for his radical, left-wing views, and for his close links with the Communist Party.
However, M Chevenement has proved a great disappointment to the right wing. Announcing his plans for private schools last week, he spoke of "practical and simple measures". The substance of these measures was to guarantee the funding of private schools while at the same time imposing certain financial limits on the schools to bring them into tine with the state sector. This was enough to satisfy lay opinion that the haughty independence of Catholic schools has been curtailed, while reassuring Catholic groups who welcomed M Chevenement's announcement as a formula for "a lasting peace in the schools war".
Further reassurance was to follow from the new minister. Outlining his policies at the start of the new school term, M Chevenement, the son of a primary schoolmaster, emphasised that "we must return to the traditions of the pre-war Third Republic". He ordered "effort by pupils and respect for teachers".
The basis of his advice was that primary schools should go back to the three Rs and abandon such innovations as the study of "awakening" in favour of geography and history "including the dates of Kings and Queens". However, this traditional commitment was to be balanced in the Minister's eyes with an advanced programme of technological teaching at secondary and lycee level. He described proposals to have each secondary school twinned with a local factory or business and to provide a computer for each school.
These ideas have been welcomed by both teachers and parents groups alike as "the
language of a good pere de jamille". These same groups have found inspiration in M Fabius's commitment to technology which he stated in his interview. He promised that all unemployed youngsters under 21 would have received at least a training if not a job by the end of 1985. There are currently 2.3 million people out of work in France.
The changing education policy of the Fabius Government is just one area which is causing concern within the ranks of traditional socialists. Some have spoken of "fig-leaf socialism", while the Minister of Agriculture, Michel Rocard and M Mauroy himself have both made it clear privately that they are both disturbed by the abandoning of manifesto commitments. However both are isolated for the time being in the wave of support which has greeted M Fabius since his appointment.
Whatever the critics within his own party might think, the Prime Minister is certainly winning back the moderate voters who have been estranged by three years of socialist rule bringing in its wake high unemployment, rising inflation and social strife. The compromise over Catholic schools is just another feature in the new programme of moderation, or "modernisation" as it is called in government circles, and the symbolic value of the backdown by the Government has not been lost on supporters or opponents alike.