Cresson has taken a beating since she was named France’s first woman prime minister in May. According to one poll, only 50 percent have faith in her–down a precipitous 15 percentage points since June. Far from infusing what Mitterrand hoped would be a “new elan” into the Socialist government, Madame le Premier Ministre is looking like a liability. Last week Cresson excoriated her critics, and began trying to project a more take-charge tone.
Cresson can’t be blamed for all of her problems. A gaping deficit in the health system, for instance, forced her to increase social-security taxes last month. But the new prime minister’s style hasn’t helped. Her first speech to Parliament was stultifyingly dull, and she quickly began squabbling with her ministers. Several outrageous comments made by Cresson before she took office–and widely published since–have created an unstatesmanlike impression. (Among them, a gibe at the sexual inhibitions of American and English men and characterizing the Japanese as “ants.”) Some snipers dismiss her appointment as more a gimmick than a sign of true change: Cresson’s cabinet is strikingly similar to that of her predecessor, Michel Rocard.
But Cresson herself discerns a hefty element of simple sexism. Formerly the minister responsible for agriculture (and later, for industry, foreign trade and European affairs), Cresson compares her reception as P.M. to the sometimes violent hazing she received from French farmers. “All women who have leadership positions will understand me,” she told a reporter, “because to varying degrees they, too, have all suffered this kind of denigration.”
Many women–not all of them Socialists–have sprung to Cresson’s defense. Francoise Giroud, a former center-right cabinet minister, recently compared the spectacle of the opposition baiting Cresson in the National Assembly to “monkeys exposing their genitals.” “It’s not even misogyny anymore–it’s obscenity,” Giroud charged. Startled, several members of Parliament responded that Cresson has not endured more tirades insults, desk-thumping, hoots and paper airplanes than many male prime ministers.
The “Bebete Show” indirectly plays on a widely believed but unsubstantiated rumor that Cresson and Mitterrand are ex-lovers. The program, says Michele Barzach, a former health minister, “has never been so horrible to anyone before [Cresson]; but this attitude–hat women who succeed at the top level in politics must have done so through seduction–s so pervasive among men that they dismiss the reaction of many women to the show as hysterical and paranoid.” Barzach predicts that a daily dose of Amabotte will be “fatal” to Cresson’s image. Pleading innocent to sexism, the “Bebete Show’s” creator, Jean Roucas, last week accused Cresson of “lacking humor.” “The derisory aspect of Amabotte comes from the fact that she’s Mitterrand’s [creature], not the fact that she’s a woman,” Roucas says mildly.
Cresson has made a point of helping other women politicians. Her cabinet includes Martine Aubry, the hardheaded new minister for labor, and Elisabeth Guigou, minister for European affairs–whose steely grasp of technical details and pouting lips once led one weekly to liken her briefings to “Kim Basinger explaining details of European fiscal policy.” But their hopes for future progress may well be pinned to Cresson’s skirts. Last month, right-winger Charles Pasqua, who dismisses Cresson as “zero, extra-extra-zero,” predicted that Cresson’s “failure will penalize women [politicians] for a long time.”
Cresson almost bit Pasqua’s head off for that one. And she has vowed to fight her other enemies, barb for barb. According to the investigative weekly Le Canard Enchaine, she recently raged to aides, “What they want is a male. Well, I’ll make like a male. They want me to shout. I’ll shout.” But if Cresson thinks this will end her image problem, she hasn’t been reading the TV page. This fall, the “Bebete Show” plans to change her puppet persona from servile and flighty. La nouvelle Cresson: shrewish and authoritarian.
