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winner of the campaign as much as Mitterrand himself.This public ‘backstage’exposure
of the political campaigns has been constant since that period, and the fact that
François Mitterrand never uttered any reproach to Séguéla (at least publicly) and, on
the contrary, hired him again for this re-election campaign in 1988, somehow tacitly
granted the consultant a special status among his peers, and also in the eyes of the
average citizen.

An indirect, but not negligible consequence of this public exposure of political
marketing techniques was an increasing awareness of the consultants’ methods and
their influence on politicians, a phenomenon which probably caused some
disillusionment among the average citizen by making them look like manipulated
puppets on a string,so to speak.

At the beginning of the 1988 presidential run, this public exposure had become so
common that the same Séguéla was repeatedly invited onto the main televised
evening newscasts in order to explain what kind of campaign he had prepared for the
re-election of the incumbent President. He was even asked by journalists to comment
publicly on how he had devised his new gimmick, the slogan ‘Génération Mitterrand’
(Mitterrand’s generation), in order to defuse any attack on Mitterrand based on his old
age,in comparison with the other politicians running.

For the first time, the limitation on candidates’ use of free airtime on the public service
television channels was also relaxed. This allowed Mitterrand to introduce into official
television campaign programmes short spots presenting in a few seconds the most
well-known events in French History, thus making him appear as heir of the Nation’s
past.
The Professionalisation of Political Communication
THE PAST DECADE: REACHING THE LIMITS OF PROFESSIONALISATION?
The failure of legal limitations:the paradoxical influence of the 1990 law
The rise of professionalised political marketing pushed electoral advertising expenses
2
to an extremely high level during the 1988 campaign . Moreover, the funding of most
of the campaigns was not really transparent, to say the least. So journalists and judges
alike started to take an interest in the sources and methods of this funding, which soon
provoked a media campaign denouncing the excesses. Consequently, politicians
devised the first law to regulate campaign expenditures in 1988, which was not very
thorough, and, in short, was intended rather to protect them from jail, since it also
introduced an automatic amnesty for any past offences committed by the politicians.
Hence soon after, on January 15th 1990, there was a new, stricter law, which still rules
French electoral campaigns. It extended the former prohibition of buying advertising
spots on radio and television to all kinds of paid advertising and similar ways of
communication during the three months before any important election. Only the fact
that the Internet did not exist in France in 1990 prevented it from following the same
fate:its French forerunner,Minitel,was no longer allowed.
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