When Lionel Jospin led the French left into parliamentary elections last spring, no one believed that the Socialist leader, considered lacklustre, cold and uncharismatic, could become a well-liked and trusted Prime Minister, especially at a time of 12.5 per cent unemployment and Maastricht-imposed austerity.
But as the commentator Alain Duhamel has said: "In this autumn of 1997, something new is happening in the minds of Frenchmen - for the first time in more than 15 years, their mood is improving." The government is popular, "cohabitation" between the right-wing President Chirac and Mr Jospin is so far running smoothly, and the economy, thanks mainly to exports buoyed up by the strong dollar, is improving.
The nugget of French conventional wisdom, which you hear from shopkeepers, taxi drivers, teachers and doctors, is that Mr Jospin fait la politique autrement - plays politics differently. He does not govern from on high, but gives real power to his cabinet ministers and talks every step through in detail; for example, an October 10th national conference will discuss employment, salaries and working hours.
"Lionel Jospin wants to prove that politics serves a purpose," his spokesman, Manuel Valls, says at the government's Matignon palace headquarters. "He has re-established confidence between the Left and France, after the (legislative election) disaster of 1993."
Even the right-wing Le Figaro has saluted Mr Jospin as a "magician". In nearly four months in power, he has consistently scored close to 60 per cent in opinion polls. If presidential elections were held tomorrow, Mr Jospin would win them. "The French have come to expect a lot of him," Mr Valls said. "They are curious; they want to discover him. He hasn't been worn out by over-exposure, like Chirac and Giscard. He projects youth, and a certain freshness. His style is simple and direct."
How did such a drastic change take place? Perhaps Mr Jospin was never as ideological as he seemed. Last May, he was criticised for failing to modernise the Socialist Party, as Tony Blair had reformed British Labour. French editorialists now say he resembles Mr Blair. In a recent interview with Le Monde, Mr Jospin twice repeated that today in France, it is the right which is dogmatic. He uses the terms "leftist realism", "balance", and "pragmatism" to explain the evolution - the far left says betrayal - of his own party's May 1997 platform.
That evolution was abundantly clear yesterday, when the government floated 20 per cent of the government-owned giant, France Telecom, on the stock market, a move that is expected to bring Ffr 36 billion (£4 billion) to government coffers. During the campaign, Mr Jospin said he would "neither privatise nor nationalise". He presented the France Telecom operation as a "simple opening of capital" - not a real privatisation.
The GAN-CIC banking and insurance group, Air France, Thomson-CSF and Aerospatiale are also in line for varying degrees of privatisation. The disunited right grumbles that Mr Jospin has stolen its programme, and headlines talk about "an Anglo-Saxon style France". Left-wing promises to abrogate the Pasqua and Debre laws on immigration and to reduce the working week to 35 hours while maintaining 39 hours' pay have also been eroded - without denting Mr Jospin's popularity.
On the one issue that most concerns French people - unemployment - the government has kept its promise to create 350,000 jobs for young people. When the draft law was debated in parliament last week, the right barely resisted. "You don't shoot Father Christmas," the liberal right member of parliament, Alain Madelin, said. The jobs are desperately awaited by unemployed French youths; 147,000 applications have already been received for 40,000 jobs in education.
President Chirac may never recover from his ill-advised decision to dissolve parliament last April. Since his June 1st electoral Waterloo, Mr Chirac had left the Elysee Palace only to travel abroad. He at last ventured out on Monday and Tuesday, for a visit to Troyes, south-east of Paris.
French television said the trip was necessary "to show he was not a prisoner of the Elysee". At a weekend conference of the RPR and UDF, the two Gaullist parties, the President's name was not even mentioned.
The mayor of Troyes, Francois Baroin, who served as Mr Chirac's spokesman during the 1995 presidential campaign, brought Gen de Gaulle's old bed out of mothballs for Mr Chirac to sleep in. It was in Troyes that Bernard de Clairvaux exhorted medieval Frenchmen to join the crusades, Mr Baroin reminded the President. But Mr Chirac might have done better to heed that warning about shooting Father Christmas. Instead, he criticised the Socialists' popular "Jobs for Youths" scheme. His host, it turned out, was among the 40 Gaullists who abstained in the National Assembly vote: "I wanted 120 jobs for my own city," Mr Baroin explained sheepishly. "I couldn't really vote against it."
Reuter adds: President Chirac reiterated yesterday that France would maintain controls at its northern borders to try to stop drug runners despite the Schengen pact easing movement across some European Union frontiers.
He said during a visit to Troyes in central France that continuing drug-trafficking to and from the Netherlands made the controls necessary.
