Paris (AFP)
Forty years ago, François Mitterrand acceded to the Elysee Palace, offering the left the first alternation in the history of the Fifth Republic after twenty-three years of reign of the right.
On May 10, 1981, the Socialist candidate was elected with nearly 52% of the vote against the outgoing Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who believed in his re-election until the end.
His victory is, among other things, the fruit of ten years of a patient strategy: first to reconstitute a great socialist party, take its leadership, marginalize its competitors, in particular Michel Rocard, then make an alliance with the Communists, without whom nothing is not possible.
In the early 1970s, the PCF weighed 20% of the electorate and was the largest opposition party.
In 1972, PS and PCF signed the "common program of the left".
Five years later, the PCF decides to break its agreement with the PS.
There will still be four Communist ministers, between 1981 and 1984.
Paradoxically, it is at the same time the union then the disunity of the left which allowed the victory of 1981. According to the historian Michel Winock, "the union was the springboard of the victory, but the rupture with the Communists reassured the centrists ", part of the electorate essential to any victory for the left.
The "Mitterrandie" met Sunday at Le Creusot (Saône-et-Loire), at the invitation of the mayor PS, David Marti, to celebrate this anniversary: former president François Hollande, former prime ministers Lionel Jospin and Bernard Cazeneuve, the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo ...
The first secretary of the PS Olivier Faure, who takes part in the march for the climate in Paris, was not there.
On May 10, 1981, "it was much more than alternation, it was a moment of change, everything was possible," Mr. Faure told AFP.
"There was a great wind of freedom, we were changing times".
Reelected in 1988, François Mitterrand will remain in power for fourteen years (including four of cohabitation with the right).
This is a record, since the only president, Jacques Chirac, to have also served two terms, will remain there for 12 years, after a seven-year term and a five-year term.
- "Algeria is France" -
At the beginning of 1981, hardly anyone believed in the victory of the left.
The magazine Le Point even headlines "Can Giscard lose?".
"The left came to power only in exceptional periods and when it did - in 1936 with the Popular Front, after the Second World War or with Guy Mollet, in 1956 - it only stayed there for two years. hardly, ”recalls ex-President François Hollande.
"I was disappointed" by the victory of the left, "but today, I think it was necessary for the breathing of French democracy. Really!" Says the former right-wing minister François Léotard in a documentary that France 2 must broadcast on May 11.
Resolute opponent to the policy of De Gaulle he denounced in his book "the permanent coup", Mitterrand will however blend into the institutions desired by the father of the Fifth Republic. "The institutions of the Fifth were bad before me, they will be bad after me," he said. "But let's be clear, if it had not been for the institutions of the Fifth, would that have held up under a parliamentary regime? Without doubt not," said Mr. Hollande.
Elected for the first time in 1946 with the support of the right in Nièvre, Mitterrand will be minister eleven times under the Fourth Republic, moving towards center-left positions.
But if he is in favor of a progressive decolonization (Indochina, certain African territories, Tunisia), he shows himself "ruthless", according to Michel Winock, during the war in Algeria.
During his visit to the Ministry of Justice, between February 1956 and May 1957, 45 militants of the Algerian cause were guillotined.
Yet it was he who, having come to power in 1981, will abolish the death penalty.
He will then make his political change by radically opposing in 1958 to de Gaulle, becoming the main representative of the non-Communist left, and achieving the first feat of putting the general on a waiver in 1965.
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