Beyond the unanimous tributes to late French politician Jacques Delors's "integrity," "uprightness," "intellectual honesty" and "noble vision of politics," his death on Wednesday, December 27, has re-opened an old wound at the heart of the French left. For several generations of Socialists, the man commemorated by all of Europe also embodied the 1983 shift by France's Socialist government toward "rigor." As early as November 1981, when he was President François Mitterrand's finance minister, the staunch social democrat, an advocate of compromise between the state and the market and a one-time adviser of former right-wing prime minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, had called for budgetary austerity.

"H was alarmed about the nationalizations and extremely concerned about public finances," recalled former Socialist senator Jean-Pierre Sueur. "But it wasn't austerity for the sake of austerity. It was austerity as part of a social policy."

"It was a governing left, it was financially responsible," agreed the president of France's Court of Accounts, Pierre Moscovici. "It was Delors who brought the PS [Parti Socialiste] into realist leftism," said political scientist Rémi Lefebvre, a professor at the University of Lille. "As early as the late 1970s, he considered the PS's position on deficits to be senseless."

But not all on the left share this position. "Delors was all about taking what was real and transforming that, not dreaming it up," said former PS party head Jean-Christophe Cambadélis. "There was always a reticence towards him, and even today, Socialists prefer to refer to [former prime minister Pierre] Mendès France than to Delors, because there is this remorse about austerity. Delors was seen as a dream-breaker."

The current head of the PS, Olivier Faure, does not see Delors as "the apostle of austerity." The 1983 turning point, he told Le Monde, "was linked to the context of the time, to the risk of France falling behind economically."

Delors continued to be a "dream-breaker" when he was the head of the European Commission, from 1985 to 1995. He was "a key figure in the deregulation of capital markets," explained Lefebvre. "He believed, along with others, that globalization would improve the disposable income of the working classes."

Jean-Pierre Chevènement, who led the PS's left wing at the time, was firmly opposed to this vision, and still criticizes Delors for it today. Through the Commission, "Jacques Delors infused French politics with a dose of liberalism greater than any that would have been possible to impose through the normal legal channels," Chevènement said on X, on Thursday. "He has thereby indelibly inflected the trajectory of the French left." He nonetheless praised Delors as "one of the last representatives of an era when politicians said what they did and did what they said."

You have 50% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.