FRANCE'S ruling centre right coalition promised to stabilise public spending, pursue tax cuts and promote negotiations on shorter working hours in a vague election manifesto published yesterday.
Citing President Jacques Chirac's call for a "new impulse", the RPR-UDF platform for a May 25th to June 1st parliamentary election undertook to modernise the state, free up private initiative, renovate the social welfare system and "make France the motor of a citizens' Europe".
The Prime Minister, Mr Alain Juppe said a re-elected centre-right government would present to parliament in its first 40 days a five year plan for holding the increase in public spending to less than the rate of inflation.
The government would also take an initiative to encourage a flexible approach to shorter working hours through negotiations between employers and trade unions on "chosen working time".
But apart from a populist, pledge to reduce the number of ministries to 15, the manifesto was strikingly short of detailed policy proposals.
It avoided specific commitments on taxes, saying only that the coalition would "accentuate the reduction of social welfare charges on lower salaries in exchange for the creation of jobs ... continue the reduction of income tax and launch a reform of the professional [business] tax".
The only apparent extra spending commitment in the document was to raise the maximum age for receiving child benefit, now 18, without saying by how much.
Defending the lack of specifics, Mr Juppe told a news conference it was "as precise as possible" and added. "We are not running a campaign for accountants."
He said France faced a strategic choice between more economic freedom and lower taxes on the one hand, and higher public spending and regulation on the other.
The opposition Socialist and Communist parties, uneasy allies when not outright enemies for nearly 80 years, met later yesterday to try to work out an election pact.
But their meeting began under, uncertain auspices after a first gathering of nearly all the left wing groups earlier in the day.
The left wing daily Liberation said a draft joint statement side" stepped wide differences on a single European currency by stating. "Withdrawal into nationalism is not the solution, but we say `no' to the liberal Europe."
Opinion polls suggest the coalition will win re-election with a sharply reduced majority.
The sociologist whose theory of France's "social fracture" inspired Mr Chirac's 1995 presidential campaign said he would vote Communist at next month's election. Emmanuel Todd, whose 1994 essay provided an intellectual rationale for the Gaullist president's tactical shift towards the centre left, told Liberation. "Given the disastrous results of Chirac's presidency, perhaps I should apologise to the French people."