Jospin fails to hold students in palm of hand

THE Socialist Youth Movement scoured the campuses all day, trying to fill the Zenith concert hall for Mr Lionel Jospin's big rally. Even so, the 6,000 capacity Paris auditorium was not full.

"Let loose!" a rap singer wearing a pirate scarf exhorted the mostly academic crowd. For France's Socialist Party is truly the party of school teachers; as minister of education from 1988 until 1992, Mr Jospin poured money into universities and research, and be promises to do so again if the left wins the May 25th and June 1st parliamentary elections.

The blue suited Mr Jospin took his place on stage among several dozen young people. An African wearing dreadlocks stood behind him. French youths of Arab and Asian origin were evidence of Mr Jospin's appeal to immigrant voters. The crowd chanted the old football match slogan, On va gagner "we're going to win" but it took Mr Jospin's attack on corruption in the Paris administration to really get them going.

Thousands of young people booed in unison. Mr Jospin finally had them in the palm of his hand, but his pedantic instinct got the better of him. "Don't boo too loudly because it's important that you hear what I say," the Socialist leader admonished, like the professor he was for 11 years. "Maybe you can boo at the end - after you've heard all I have to say."

Was it any wonder that Lionel le mal aime, Lionel the earnest, was not their first choice? Nearly everyone I talked to at the rally said they would prefer to be led by Mr Michel Rocard, the former prime minister whose career was broken - apparently out of jealousy - by the late Socialist President, Francois Mitterrand.

The Socialist Party nearly self destructed over Mr Mitterrand's succession in the early 1990s, and it remains fragmented among followers of Mr Jospin, Mr Rocard, the former prime minister Mr Laurent Fabius, and the former President of the European Commission Mr Jacques Delors.

Mr Jospin won the power struggle almost by default Mitterrand preferred Mr Fabius, but he was stained by the HIV blood scandal in which more than 3,500 French people contracted AIDs. The gentlemanly Mr Delors withdrew rather than fight, for which some Socialists still condemn his lack of courage. That left the hardworking Mr Jospin, who has neither the razor sharp intelligence of Mr Fabius nor the gravitas and magnetism of Mr Rocard.

Mr Jospin's official biography primly notes that from 1990, "he progressively took his distance from the internal life of the Socialist Party, marked by internal quarrels and practices of which he disapproved". He fled the Socialists' burning house, but in 1995 he came back to save the furniture by putting up a respectable fight against Jacques Chirac in the presidential election and amazing France by winning 47.3 per cent of the final tally.

The reproach most often levelled at Mr Jospin is that after the 1995 election he missed a golden opportunity to build a Nouveau Part Socialiste, just as Mr Tony Blair invented New Labour. The "feminisation" of the party under Mr Jospin brought some new energy and faces, but it still gives the impression of being doctrinaire and old fashioned. With its programme for creating 350,000 public sector jobs, the reduction of the working week to 35 hours and the rejection of further privatisations, the French group is the most left wing of European socialist parties.

It was the Socialists under Mitterrand who negotiated the Maastricht Treaty and helped to blather the euro. Since the beginning of the parliamentary campaign, Mr Jospin has attached conditions to that commitment, partly as a concession to the anti Europe Communist Party, with whom he concluded a shaky alliance. Mr Jospin's euroreticence is popular with Socialist voters. On Europe as with all other issues in the campaign - the divide is between the right's liberal, free market economic ideology and the left's more humanist and state interventionist policies.

"There's no point building a liberal Europe," Mr Jerome Poitte, a Jospin supporter, explained at the rally. "A liberal Europe would be like the US, and I wouldn't want to live there. Economic liberalism is the model of the 19th century. We can do better."