poster for PSU candidate
Huguette Bouchardeau. PSU was born through the fusion of the
Autonomous Socialist Party (PSA), the
Socialist Left Union (UGS), and the group around the journal
Tribune du Communisme. The latter was a splinter group of the
French Communist Party (PCF), which had left after the 1956 inner conflict caused by the
Soviet invasion of Hungary. The PSA and the UGS were splinter groups of the
French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) party, which had left due to the repressive policy of the SFIO Prime Minister
Guy Mollet during the
Algerian War of Independence and his support to General
Charles de Gaulle's return and the advent of the
Fifth Republic under the military pressure. The three groups were closely linked from 1958. In 1961, the newly formed party was joined by
Pierre Mendès-France, after he had left the
Radical Party, and by
Alain Savary, a former SFIO member as opposed as Mendès-France was to
Charles de Gaulle's return to power in the turmoil of the
May 1958 crisis. In 1965, the PSU aligned with the SFIO and the PCF in supporting the candidacy of
François Mitterrand in the
presidential election. In contrast with the established socialist parties, the PSU also supported the student uprising of
May 1968; it subsequently moved away from cooperation with the
Socialist Party (PS) which succeeded the SFIO after 1969, and developed its own program, based on
autogestion (
workers' self-management). Michel Rocard was the PSU candidate for the
1969 presidential elections, obtaining 3.61% of the vote in the first round. The party again campaigned for Mitterrand in the
1974 presidential elections — a move which encountered the opposition of the PSU's own supporters at
grassroots level; the PSU did not sign Mitterrand's
Common programme of the Left (agreed with the Communists), and a sizeable section of the party activists, led by Michel Rocard and
Robert Chapuis, left to join the renewed
Socialist Party (believing that they could better function as a leftist tendency with the PS). The PSU supported the
self-managed Lip factory. PSU introduced
Huguette Bouchardeau as its candidate for the
1981 presidential elections; she obtained 1.1% of the vote in the first round. In the
1988 presidential elections, the PSU supported the communist dissident candidate
Pierre Juquin, who obtained 2.1% of the votes in the first round. In 1989, PSU merged with the
New Left for Socialism, Ecology and Self-management (Juquin's movement), and formed the
Red and Green Alternatives (nowadays integrated in the group
Les Alternatifs). ==National Secretaries==