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later qualified their support for some ethnic minority causes (Blatt 1997). The mid-1980s saw the Socialist government adopt a change of tone. Faced with the electoral success of the far-right National Introduction 5 Front party and right-wing politicians competing on an antiimmigration platform, financial incentives to encourage migrants settled in France to return to their country of origin were reinstated in 1984 and new restrictions were introduced on family reunions. Later, the election of Jacques Chirac as Prime Minister of a centre-right government in 1986
and services during 1995 and to determine the cost-of-living adjustment that should be carried out for 1996. 54 While the GCWL demanded a 76 per cent wage increase, business representatives were unwilling to offer more than 15 per cent. At this point, the committee suspended its meetings. 55 As a response to the Government’s silence and inaction, the GCWL decided to use the imminent visit of the French President Jacques Chirac to pressure the Government and therefore issued an ultimatum: the Government would answer the
decade before the fracture sociale (social fracture) became a fashionable political term (surprisingly coined by the right-wing gaullist party of Jacques Chirac during the 1995 general elections), a new expression was used to describe those who had lost all social benefits. The emergence of the nouveaux pauvres (new poor) led in 1988 (11 October) to the creation of the Revenu Minimum d’Insertion (RMI: the minimum benefit for those with no other source of income) by the socialist government led by the prime minister Michel Rocard
wartime period. In 1993, on the anniversary of la rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv – when during 16–17 July 1942 Paris police rounded up over 13,000 Jews and then held them in a cycling stadium for several days before eventual deportation to concentration camps – François Mitterrand established 16 July as a day of commemoration of Jewish and racist persecution by the Vichy regime. Upon succeeding him as President, Jacques Chirac went one step further: the French State finally accepted responsibility for the deportation of thousands of Jews during the Occupation, which Mitterrand had