Communist leader calls for major push against social inequality
MARTIGUES, (France): French Communist Party leader Robert Hue sought to
inject new life into his stagnating party on Saturday, calling on delegates
at a party congress to launch a "great, national movement" to fight social
inequality in France.
Hue said that the party should engage in a "large-scale action, a great,
national movement of construction ... to significantly push back inequality
in our country."
Hue's speech was designed to deliver a morale-boosting message to party
members who have had to cope with falling support since the 1991 collapse of
the Soviet Union.
Hue said the national movement against inequality should involve a "truth
campaign," aimed at informing people about their rights and collecting
testimonies from those on the margins of society.
Public debates involving charity groups and experts would also be held, he
told some 1,000 delegates gathered in Martigues, near the southern French
city of Marseille.
The fight against inequality is meant to give disillusioned activists a
cause. It follows a national mobilization against unemployment last year,
when tens of thousands of leftist demonstrators marched through Paris to
protest against job losses and capitalism.
Despite declining support, the Communists currently hold three Cabinet posts
in the leftist coalition government, but even that has been a source of
contention for hard-liners angry over what they regard as compromises.
In European Parliament elections in June, the Communist Party polled an
embarrassingly low 6.8 percent. Membership, while still one of the strongest
in Western Europe, has fallen from about 600,000 in the early 1980s to about
210,000 people.
One example of the party's efforts to change its image was its decision not
to invite the Russian Communist Party to the congress, in protest at the
Russian group's support of the Kremlin's war in Chechnya. The French
Communist Party was once one of the Soviet Communist Party's most slavish
followers.
In another concession to modernity, the congress on Saturday approved plans
to transform its rigid pyramidal leadership structure into a broader-based
body that includes elected officials.
The national committee is to be replaced by a national council, more than
half of whose 250 members will be elected officials, and the secretariat is
to give way to an executive college. (AP)
For reprint rights: Times Syndication Service
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