Profile: French Socialist Presidential Candidate Lionel Jospin

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, April 16, 2002

Profile: French Socialist Presidential Candidate Lionel Jospin

French Prime Minister and Socialist leader Lionel Jospin is bidding for the presidency for a second time, having had conservative President Jacques Chirac as the main rival for two times.

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French Prime Minister and Socialist leader Lionel Jospin is bidding for the presidency for a second time, having had conservative President Jacques Chirac as the main rival for two times.

Seven years ago, Jospin finished first in the first round of election but suffered an honorable defeat to Chirac by 47.33 to 52. 67 percent in the second round.

Unlike statesmanlike Chirac -- widely seen as a born politician with amiable look and good crowd-pleasing talents, the 64-year-old bespectacled Jospin looks cheerless, his mechanical body language hardly producing charismatic impression.

Opinion polls show that some French dislike Jospin's " schoolmarmish" look -- committed, hardworking but deadly dull while others find in him a counterattack of "honesty and principles" to Chirac's flamboyant "warmness and cynicism."

Jospin was born in 1937 to a Protestant family in a Paris suburb. He entered the Institute of Politic Studies of Paris in 1956 and attended L'Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA) in the early 1960s, a post-graduate school that fosters France's governing elite.

It was revealed last year that during his ENA years, Jospin had close contacts with a Trotskyist group. He commented that it was an intellectual experience for which he "has to formulate neither regrets nor excuses."

Jospin started his career in the French Foreign Ministry, specialized in the issues of development of cooperation in the Third World. Following the 1968 movement of general protests, Jospin quit the career leading to a high-ranking official and diplomat under a conservative government.

In 1970, he became professor of economy at a university in Paris and taught there for the next 11 years.

In 1971, Jospin joined the French Socialist Party at its founding congress. He soon caught the attention of its founder Francois Mitterrand and held various important posts before becoming first secretary of the party in 1981 when Mitterrand won the presidency.

When Mitterrand won a second term in 1988, Jospin became education minister. Five years later, the Socialists lost the legislative elections and Jospin withdrew from the government.

In 1995, he raced for the presidency and lost to Chirac. From 1995 to 1997, he served again as Socialist party secretary. When the left won back the legislative majority, Jospin was invited by Chirac to take the post of prime minister.

He led the government in the next five years with a coalition of Socialists, Communists, Greens and leftist radicals.

Guided by "left realism," Jospin was a pragmatic government leader. He oversaw the privatization of major state-owned companies and accepted the budget restrictions imposed by the European Union so that France could be qualified for the single currency.

His main reform was to cut the legal working week from 39 to 35 hours, one of Europe's most controversial job creation policies. In his campaign for the presidency, Jospin proudly announced that his government has reduced the jobless population by 1 million in the past five years.

On the social front, his government launched the Civil Solidarity Pact, a legally-recognized union for homosexual couples.

In 1994, Jospin married Syviane Agacinski, a philosophy professor at the School of Social Sciences in Paris, who has a son of a previous relationship. Jospin has two other children from a previous marriage.

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