Gauche caviar
Template:Short description Template:Italic title Template:Lang (Template:Translation) is a pejorative French term to describe someone who claims to be a socialist while living in a way that contradicts socialist values. The expression is a political neologism dating from the 1980s and implies a degree of hypocrisy.Template:Citation needed The dictionary Petit Larousse defines Template:Lang as a pejorative expression for a "Progressivism combined with a taste for society life and its accoutrements".<ref>http://www.larousse.fr : under Caviar: Gauche caviar, gauche dont le progressisme s'allie au goût des mondanités et des situations acquises</ref>Template:Clarify One description referred to it as "the free-thinking, authority-hating, individualistic, tolerant, socialist position... which shaded into a bohemian, existential, communitarian, fairly depressed" worldview espoused by people with money and good clothes.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
The concept is broadly similar to the English Champagne socialist, the American Limousine liberal or latte liberal, the German Salonkommunist or Champagnersozialist, the Dutch salonsocialist, the Italian Radical chic, the Polish kawiorowa lewica, the Portuguese esquerda caviar, the Spanish pijoprogre, the Argentinian Spanish zurdo con osde, the Chilean Spanish red set, the Peruvian Spanish Izquierda Caviar and the Danish Kystbanesocialist, referring to well-off coastal neighborhoods north of Copenhagen. Other similar terms in English include Hampstead liberal, liberal elite, chardonnay socialist, smoked salmon socialist, and Bollinger Bolshevik.
Usage
The term was once prevalent in Parisian circles, applied deprecatingly to those who professed allegiance to the Socialist Party (PS), but who maintained a far from proletarian lifestyle that distinguished them from the working-class base of the PS. A more explicit reference identified this group as left-wingers who speak with great passion about the plight of the poor while eating caviar in their spectacular Parisian duplex apartment.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
The label was also employed by detractors to describe François Mitterrand.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> This was further reinforced by the fact that several members of his administration were identified as part of the gauche caviar such as Jack Lang, who was the culture minister.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
In early 2007, Ségolène Royal became identified with the Template:Lang when it was revealed that she had been avoiding paying taxes. The description damaged her campaign for the French presidency.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Similarly French politician Bernard Kouchner and his wife Christine Ockrent have been labelled with the term. However, his appointment as Minister of Foreign Affairs was not hampered by the label.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Other supposed members of this Template:Lang include Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former IMF managing director, and his wife, the journalist Anne Sinclair, heiress to much of the fortune of her maternal grandfather, the art dealer Paul Rosenberg. It is said that around 2015, the gauche caviar also supported the Greek government of SYRIZA and PM Tsipras, "desperate for a new 'anti-imperialist hero' after Hugo Chavez's death".<ref>Cas Mudde, "SYRIZA: The Failure of the Populist Promise", Springer, 2016, p. 16, 23</ref>
The weekly news magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, has been described as the "quasi-official organ of France's Template:Lang".<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
Regardless of whether Template:Lang is accepted by those given such a label, politicians who fit this classification wield power in the French polity. For instance, during the administration of Mitterrand, a number of policies were adopted to avoid offending this group, which included the Template:Lang (Template:Translation).<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>