Gauche caviar ("Caviar left") 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.
It is broadly similar to the English Champagne socialist, the American Limousine liberal or latte liberal, the German Salonkommunist, the Italian Radical Chic, the Brazilian Portuguese esquerda festiva, 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 and Bollinger Bolshevik.
The dictionary Petit Larousse defines left caviar as a pejorative expression for a "Progressivism combined with a taste for society life and its accoutrements".
The term was once prevalent in Parisian circles, applied deprecatingly to those who professed allegiance to the Socialist Party, but who maintained a far from proletarian lifestyle that distinguished them from the working-class base of the French Socialist Party.
It was often employed by detractors of François Mitterrand.
In early 2007, Ségolène Royal was identified with the gauche caviar when it was revealed that she had been avoiding paying taxes. The description damaged her campaign for the French presidency. 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. Other supposed members of this gauche caviar 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.
The weekly news magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, has been described as the "quasi-official organ of France's 'gauche caviar'".