France a Time for Soul-Searching:Mitterrand’s troubled Socialists

Four proud years ago, France’s Socialist Party swept into power with a swaggering self-confidence that its ambitious programs for economic expansion and social welfare would usher in a new era of grandeur for the republic. Since then, however, the party has lost much of that self-assurance, as voters have become disillusioned by the country’s lagging economy and by suspicions that the government of President Francois Mitterrand has been trying to cover up its involvement in the July sabotage sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, flagship of the antinuclear Greenpeace movement. Opinion polls show that the voters are turning away from the Socialists to the conservative opposition parties. To many political observers, it now appears more than likely that the party will go down to defeat in legislative elections next March, which could force Mitterrand, whose term runs until 1988, into an uneasy and unstable “cohabitation” with a rightist parliamentary majority.

Accordingly, it was in an atmosphere of considerable tension that some 4,500 delegates, parliamentarians, party functionaries, journalists and foreign observers gathered in the southwestern city of Toulouse last week for the Socialists’ biennial congress. The delegates’ agenda: to draw up the main lines of a new party policy and hammer out a strategy for the election campaign. Their real mission: to resolve the party’s identity crisis and find ways to restore its lost respect. “Toulouse is not the congress of disillusion and defeat, as they would have us believe,” insisted Gaston Defferre, one-time presidential candidate, former Interior Minister and now Mitterrand’s Minister for Planning. “It is the congress of counterattack.”

For most Frenchmen, it has become increasingly difficult to know exactly where the Socialists stand on issues. After a vigorous campaign to abolish the ! death penalty and expand prisoners’ rights, the party was forced by rising crime rates to back away from such liberalizations. Plagued by two-digit inflation in 1982, Mitterrand put pragmatism before ideology and turned from big-spending policies to belt-tightening austerity. Although it champions self-determination in Third World nations, the government has moved cautiously in meeting the demands of separatists in the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia. Last year Mitterrand replaced Premier Pierre Mauroy, a populist, with Laurent Fabius, a technocrat who avidly supports the President’s pragmatic approach. That was too much for the Communists, and they pulled out of a long-standing alliance between the two parties. These policy switches disillusioned many committed Socialists but failed to win many conservative converts.

Perhaps nothing has had such a corrosive effect on the public’s view of the Socialists as recent disclosures about the government’s role in the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, in which a crew member was killed. For weeks the government denied any involvement in the bombing of the ship, which had been docked in the harbor of Auckland, New Zealand, before it was to lead a protest against French nuclear testing on Mururoa Atoll. Under persistent pressure from the French press, Premier Fabius was eventually forced to admit that French intelligence agents had indeed been ordered to blow up the ship. The scandal tarred the government with suspicions of a cover-up and forced the resig- nation of Defense Minister Charles Hernu.

Long before the Socialist delegates began filing into the cavernous Parc des Expositions on an island in the Garonne River, the battle lines on how best to resolve the party’s problems had been drawn. On one side was a loyalist camp, known as the Mitterrandistes, whose advocates argue that the Socialists must not abandon their original constituency on the left. The loyalists are opposed to a coalition with centrist groups, even if the Socialists take a drubbing in next year’s elections and want to leave the door open for a revival of the old alliance with the Communists. “I do not erase the Communist Party from the French political map,” said Party Secretary Lionel Jospin, 48, who leads the Mitterrandistes.

The challenge to that view is led by former Agriculture Minister Michel Rocard, 55, a political moderate and longtime Mitterrand rival. The Rocardiens are urging the party to shed its Marxist ideological trappings and modernize its image along Social Democratic lines. They say it must reject the Communists and court centrist and independent voters. Said Rocard: “The French people do not want another version of the (Socialist-Communist) common program, warmed over for today’s taste.”

Rocard, an economist, is a member of the Socialist Party steering committee and mayor of a Paris suburb called Conflans-Ste.-Honorine. Widely admired for his wit and personal charm, he is one of the country’s most popular politicians, regularly topping the opinion polls with about a 55% approval rating on general leadership ability. Not only is he far in front of Mitterrand’s 38%, but he also leads Premier Fabius, 39, and former Premier Raymond Barre, 61, the most popular conservative opposition figure, both of whom draw some 50%. Rocard, whose standing among the Socialist rank and file had never equaled his public ratings, has emerged in recent months as an influential force within the party. Rocard, concedes one Mitterrandiste deputy, “has attracted a lot of discontented Socialists of all sorts, even a number in the left wing of the party, simply as a means of protesting.”

Even as they wrangled over motions and amendments last week, the delegates knew that the real struggle for survival will come with next spring’s elections. For Mitterrand to pursue his policies with any effectiveness through 1988, his party must win about 30% of the popular vote next March. That would re-establish the Socialists, who currently hold 285 seats in the 491-seat National Assembly, as the country’s largest single party and deny a majority to their major opponents, the neo-Gaullist Rally for the Republic and the right-of-center Union for French Democracy. But reaching that 30% threshold will be a daunting task. From a historic high of 37% in 1981, the Socialist share of the vote fell to 21% in the June 1984 European Parliament elections and rebounded only slightly, to 25%, in regional voting last March. Party strategists estimate that there is solid support for the Socialists among only 22% to 24% of the electorate. To achieve the magic 30%, the Socialists must make gains on both the left and the right. How to do that is at the root of all the soul searching within the party.

“Toulouse can and must be a starting point for a new impulse. Everything is possible if you give yourselves the means.” Those were Mitterrand’s encouraging words to the congress, but, perhaps symbolically, they were read to the delegates over booming loudspeakers by a party official. The President chose not to attend the three-day affair. “The party is not my business any longer,” he said during a barnstorming tour of Brittany last week. But, added the man who led the Socialists to power, “I would like to see them united.”