Elected 10 May 1981 Fran?ois Mitterrand Helped Shaped Today's Europe

Fran?ois Mitterrand, the Forgotten French President Who Shaped Today’s Europe

Denis MacShane

Exactly 40 years ago – 10 May 1981 - France elected its first socialist president, Fran?ois Mitterrand.

The arrival of Mitterrand two years after Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, and one year after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, transformed European politics.

His arrival in power in 1981 of the world’s then fourth biggest economy put a massive road-block in the way of a complete Reagan-Thatcher ideological takeover of the West. Mitterrand took banks and firms into public ownership, backed social investment, and promoted worker rights.

After 1980 France could not opt out of global economic changes including the transfer of much manufacturing to Asia but in France it was done without the cruelty and brutality of the Thatcher attack on northern England and Reagan’s crusade against trade unions.

Mitterrand’s real contribution to Europe however was to work in partnership with Helmut Kohl elected a year later, 1982, and – astonishingly given their political differences - with another European leader, Margaret Thatcher.

Thatcher’s later turn to anti-EU hostility and her adoption as the Patron Saint of Tory Europhobia has obscured the extent to which she did more than any other British prime minister – more certainly than any of her successors including Tony Blair – to lay the foundations of the modern EU which David Cameron led us out of with his reckless plebiscite in 2016. Mitterrand said of Thatcher: ‘She had the mouth of Marilyn Monroe but the eyes of Caligula but in his first presidency 1981-88 he played her beautifully and gently led her into being one of the mid-wives of today’s EU.

After Helmut Kohl’s election in 1982 Mitterrand worked with the German centre-right chancellor  to entice Margaret Thatcher into a full-hearted embrace of Europe. As she waved her handbag about demanding her money back, Mitterrand and Kohl threw her a sprat and caught a mackerel. She won her rebate which by any standards was fully justified as Britain’s agricultural sector was nugatory at a time when most European transfer payments were made to farmers. But in exchange she agreed firstly, to increase the Brussels budget so that between 1984 and 1990 the UK payment to Europe went from ￡654 million to ￡2.4 billion.

Secondly, she agreed to the single biggest transfer or sharing of sovereignty in the history of European construction since 1950. She worked with Mitterrand and Kohl on the Single European Act which abolished national vetoes in many areas which had been jealously guarded areas of national sovereignty. She also warmly supported the enlargement of Europe to take in the then poor countries like Spain, Greece and Portugal whose citizens flooded into northern Europe to do the low-pay work that native German, French or Nordic citizens no longer wanted to do. In  1984 she called for Europe to have a Common Foreign and Security Policy.

Finally, she agreed to Mitterrand’s suggestion that his Finance and Economic Minister, Jacques Delors, a federal Europhile, should become President of the European Commission. Delors had steered Mitterrand away from his early Bennite style enthusiasm for natonalisation and import controls. Once in Brussels, Delors embarked on the most creative or as Eurosceptics might put it the most integrative decade in European history.

Delors foolishly fell foul of Mrs Thatcher with an ill-judged speech to the British trade unions in 1988 when he lauded a role for trade unions and worker rights in his idea of so-called Social Europe. In fact, Delors was no militant and a firm opponent of communists in French trade unions. But he failed to understand that the alpha and omega of Mrs Thatcher’s sense of Britain meant a relentless confrontation with, indeed, a crushing of militant trades unions such as had become destructively powerful in the 1970s.

On the face of it Delors won and Mrs Thatcher lost as her cri de coeur at the Despatch Box of “No! No! No!” was followed soon after in 1990 by her leaving Downing Street. But perhaps Mrs Thatcher had the last laugh with Brexit.

Mitterrand went on to bind Germany into Europe with the creation of the Euro and more shared partnership between European nations.

Mitterrand died soon after standing down as president in 1995. After a life-long reputation as a schemer, cynic and Boris Johnson style womaniser he became president of France 40 years ago aged 65. He found an unlikely and perhaps unconscious partner in Margaret Thatcher in the most important few years of European construction since the launch of the Schumann Plan and the Common Market in the 1950s.

Mitterrand had faults galore, not the least the shameful deaths linked to the illegal sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. But he changed France and Europe as much if not more than General de Gaulle and certainly made a bigger contribution to the history of the continent in his time in office than any British prime minister since Churchill. He deserves to be better known than he is in Britain or America.

Denis MacShane is the former Minister of Europe. He wrote the first biography of Fran?ois Mitterrand in English in 1982 published by Quartet.