Foreign policy of the François Mitterrand administration maintaining as many options as possible until forced to pursue a particular course. However, once he made a choice he kept his ministers on a tight leash. Defense Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement lost his ministry over his opposition to French participation in the First Gulf War. Initially, Mitterrand, like British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was vary of German reunification, fearing that it would lead to Germany gaining too much power. He was reluctant to take action because Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev warned it would lead to a military coup d'état in the Soviet Union. Mitterrand did speak in favour of
Mitterrand and the far right helped finance all the principal wingist politicians from the 1950s to the beginning of the 1970s, including Pierre Mendès France. Worse still, after Mitterrand's 1981 win, Bousquet was received at the Élysée palace “to talk politics”. In an interview with Pascale Froment (René Bousquet's biographer) Mitterrand declared, "I listened to him as a political commentator. He saw me as a continuation of his halted career." Only in 1986, when media criticism of Bousquet began to gain in volume, did Mitterrand stop seeing him, and he did not comment on the matter until the 1994 interview with Jean-Pierre Elkabach. Lionel Jospin