18. Michel Rocard

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French politician and statesmen, former prime minister, recognized as a major Socialist leader both in his own country and in the European Parliament. After studying at the École Nationale d'Administration and the Institut d'Études Politiques, he joined the civil service. He led the Unified Socialist Party, was active in the 1968 student demonstrations, and won a small percentage of the 1969 presidential vote. In 1974, he supported François Mitterrand for the presidency, and later merged his party with the new Socialist Party. In Mitterrand's government, he held several ministerial appointments, but resigned in 1985 over a disagreement concerning a proposal for proportional representation made by the government of Laurent Fabius. In 1988 he became premier, but was criticized by the left for moving to the right in economic policy. In May 1991, he was replaced by Edith Cresson. Rocard served as head of the Socialist Party from 1993 to 1994. Very recently, he has been active as a member of the European Parliament’s “Independent Commission on Turkey,” chaired by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, which paid Turkey a fact-finding and assessment visit in June-July 2004, meeting and talking with various academics, intellectuals, and other public personages. At that time, Michel Rocard was under pressure from his French-Armenian constituency to insist on making recognition of the Armenian genocide a pre-condition for EU negotiations with Turkey. Subsequently he came to withdraw this insistence. This cleared the way both for a favourable report by the Independent Commission on Turkey, and also for a very favourable, unconditional vote by the European Parliament on 15 December 2004, which had a significant impact on the 17 December 2004 decision by the EU to schedule unconditional membership negotiations with Turkey for late 2005. Michel Rocard might be expected to speak on any aspect of European politics, as well as on the EU and Turkey.