Lionel Jospin

Lionel Jospin (born July 12, 1937, Meudon, France) is a Socialist Party politician who served as prime minister of France (1997–2002) in a cohabitation government with conservative President Jacques Chirac.

Born in the Parisian suburb of Meudon, Jospin inherited many of his socialist beliefs from his schoolteacher father. After two years of obligatory military service, in 1963 he entered the École Nationale d’Administration, the training ground for most of France’s governing elite. He graduated near the top of his class and joined the foreign ministry. Amid the protests against Gaullist leadership in the late 1960s, Jospin became restless with his place in the government bureaucracy and went to the United States to study. In 1970 he returned to France and took a position at the University Institute of Technology of Paris-Sceaux, where he taught economics until 1981.

Jospin joined the Socialist Party in 1971 and won a parliamentary seat six years later. He soon became a favourite of party leader François Mitterrand, and, when Mitterrand became president in 1981, Jospin was promoted to head of the party. As minister of education during Mitterrand’s second term, Jospin developed a plan to build new classrooms throughout the country, as well as seven new universities, but he also encountered controversy. In 1989 he made the decision to allow Muslim female students to wear veils in public schools, a violation of the principle of separation of church and state in the view of many French people.

In the early 1990s Jospin’s political career was in severe decline. He lost his cabinet post in 1992 and his parliamentary seat in 1993. With Mitterrand suffering from cancer and other leading Socialists plagued by scandal, the party selected him as its presidential candidate in 1995. Although he ran with no platform and little fanfare, he only narrowly lost to Jacques Chirac, the candidate of the conservative Rally for the Republic party.

After the Socialists and their allies won a majority in the National Assembly in 1997, Jospin was appointed by Chirac to replace Alain Juppé as prime minister. While in government Jospin kept his campaign pledge to shorten the work week to 35 hours, and his policies sought to reduce unemployment. Although he often clashed with the conservative Chirac, he surprised his critics by pursuing moderate policies of privatization and fiscal restraint. He ran against Chirac for the presidency again in 2002, but, after a lacklustre campaign, Jospin finished third, behind both Chirac and nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen, prompting him to resign as prime minister shortly thereafter. In 2006 he briefly campaigned for president but dropped out after trailing far behind Ségolène Royal for his party’s nomination.