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:This article discusses political groups and tendencies in France; for information on the political and administrative structures of France, see Government of France.1 French politics under the Fifth Republic
After Charles de Gaulle had the constitution of the French Fifth Republic adopted in 1958, France was ruled by successive right-wing administrations until 1981. Throughout the 1960s, left-wing parties fared rather badly in national elections. The successive governments generally applied the Gaullist program of national independence, and modernization in a dirigiste fashion. The Gaullist government, however, was criticized for its heavy-handedness: while elections were free, the state had a monopoly on radio and TV broadcasting and sought to have its point of view on events imposed (this monopoly was however not absolute, since there were radio stations transmitting from nearby countries specifically for the benefit of the French). De Gaulle's social policies were decidedly conservative.
In May 1968, series of worker strikes and student riots rocked France. These did not, however, result in an immediate change of government, with a right-wing administration being triumphantly reelected in the snap election of June 1968. The French electorate turned down a 1969 referendum on the reform of the French Senate, in a move widely considered to be mostly motivated by weariness with de Gaulle.
In 1981, François Mitterrand, a Socialist, was elected president, on a program of far-reaching reforms. After securing a majority in parliament through a snap election, his government ran a program of social and economic reforms:
- social reforms:
- abolition of the death penalty;
- removal of legislation criminalizing certain homosexual behaviors (since the French RevolutionThe period of the French Revolution in the history of France covers the years between 1789 and 1799, in which democrats and republicans overthrew the absolute monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church perforce underwent radical restructuring. While France wo, France had never criminalized homosexuality between adults in private, but since the 1960s homosexuality was officially considered an illness to cure);
- economic reforms:
- the government embarked on a wave of nationalizationNationalization (or Nationalisation , also known as public ownership or socialization (or Socialisation) is the act of taking private assets into government or state ownership. It is the opposite of privatization. Arguments for nationalization In the cases;
- the duration of the legal workweek was set to 39 h, instead of the previous 40 h.
However, in 1983Events January January 1 Beat Raaflaub became Basel Boys Choir's new conductor January 1 the ARPANET officially changes to use the Internet Protocol, creating the Internet. January 1 compulsory wearing of seat belts becomes law in the UK. January 2 The mu, high inflation and economies woes forced a dramatic turnaround with respect to economic policies, known as rigueur (rigor) – the Socialist-Communist government then embarked on policies of fiscal and spending restraint. Though the nationalizations were subsequently reverted by both subsequent left-wing and right-wing governments, the social reforms undertaken have stood still.
Since then, the government alternated between a left-wing coalition (composed of the French Socialist Party, the French Communist Party and more recently Les Verts, the Greens) and a right-wing coalition (composed of Jacques Chirac's Rally for the Republic, later replaced by the Union for a Popular Movement, and the Union for French Democracy). Those two coalitions are fairly stable; there have been none of the mid-term coalition reorganizations and governments overthrown that were commonplace under the Fourth Republic.
