Redheads in Normandy

R.W. Johnson

• The British General Election of 1997 by David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh
  Macmillan, 343 pp, £17.50, November 1997, ISBN 0 333 64776 9
• Labour's Landslide by Andrew Geddes and Jonathan Tonge
  Manchester, 211 pp, £40.00, December 1997, ISBN 0 7190 5159 2
• Britain Votes 1997 edited by Pippa Norris and Neil Gavin
  Oxford, 253 pp, £12.99, January 1998, ISBN 0 19 922322 X
• Collapse of Stout Party: The Decline and Fall of the Tories by Julian Crtitchley and Morrison Halcrow
  Gollancz, 288 pp, £20.00, November 1997, ISBN 0 575 06277 0
• Les Election Legislatives, 25 Mai-1er Juin 1997: Le president desavoue
  Le Monde, 146 pp, frs 45.00, June 1998, ISBN 2 00 153419 1

No one this time last year would have predicted a victory for the Left in France, yet it is in a sense far easier to explain Jospin’s triumph than Blair’s. President Chirac, elected in 1995 on a promise that he would reduce unemployment, had actually done the opposite; and, faced with the need of his deeply unpopular prime minister, Alain Juppé, to squeeze the economy yet further to meet the Maastricht criteria, called a snap election simply because he feared things would get tougher by the time Parliament’s mandate ran out in 1998. He was eager, too, to take advantage of the fact that the Socialist Party was still in a mess after the devastating unravelling of the Mitterrand Presidency and its own catastrophic defeat in the 1993 election, which left the Party with 56 seats in a chamber of 577 Deputies.