François Mitterrand: The Last Republican Monarch

This chapter deals with the sole French President who succeeded in completing two seven-year terms, François Mitterrand. For the first time since 1958, the left returned to power in 1981. The socialist leader François Mitterrand obtained a large parliamentary majority after his election as President. He decided to include four communist ministers, even if the left union had been dissolved in 1977. During the first two years of his presidency, he made some important social reforms, such as the fifth week of paid holidays or the abolition of the death penalty. In 1986, the left was defeated during the legislative elections. It was the first time the presidency and the government had been led by rival parties. This opened a new chapter of French political life known as “cohabitation”. François Mitterrand was securely re-elected in 1988, but the subsequent parliamentary elections returned a very small socialist majority. The last four years of his presidency were marked by scandals (his hidden daughter, corruption affairs), his suffering from cancer and a new, albeit less strained, cohabitation from 1993 to 1995. With the consecration of the “socialist monarchy”, but also with the subsequent dilution of the presidential attributes during the two periods of cohabitation, Mitterrand’s fourteen years in power were, indeed, a mirror of the complex metamorphosis of the French semi-presidential system.