quality:corruption, quality:correction, linguistic:paraphrasing, information:extraction, structural:expansion
European policy

He initially opposed further membership, fearing the Community was not ready and it would water it down to a free trade area.

Mitterrand supported the enlargement of the Community to include Spain and Portugal (which both joined in January 1986). In February 1986 he helped the Single European Act come into effect. He worked well with his friend Helmut Kohl and improved Franco-German relations significantly. Together they fathered the Maastricht Treaty, which was signed on 7 February 1992. It was ratified by referendum, approved by just over 51% of the voters.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was against a German reunification and also against the then discussed Maastricht Treaty.When Kohl, then West German Chancellor, asked François Mitterrand to agree to reunification (France was one of the four Allies who had to agree to the Two Plus Four -treaty), François Mitterrand told Kohl he accepted it only in the event Germany would abandon the Deutsche Mark and adopt the Euro. Kohl accepted this package deal (including without talking to Karl Otto Pöhl, then President of the Bundesbank).

That year, he also established the Mitterrand doctrine, a policy of not extraditing convicted far-left terrorists of the years of lead such as Cesare Battisti to Italy, due to the alleged non-conformity of Italian legislation to European standards of rule of law, in particular the anti-terrorism laws passed by Italy in the 1970s and 1980s. When the European Court of Human Rights finally ruled against the François Mitterrand doctrine, the policy had already led to most of the criminals never being punished for their crimes.