France The Perils of Power Sharing

When Jacques Chirac led his center-right coalition to victory in France’s parliamentary elections a year ago, he and Socialist President Francois Mitterrand found themselves in unexplored political territory. Never before in the 28-year history of France’s Fifth Republic had a Premier, or head of government, on one side of the political spectrum had to coexist with a President, or head of state, on the other. Now, halfway into the two-year experiment the French call cohabitation, Chirac, 54, has helped make the power-sharing arrangement work better than most political observers had thought possible. But in the process the ambitious Premier may have lost ground in the race to become France’s next President.

Chirac is scheduled this week to make his first visit as Premier to the U.S., where he will attempt to burnish his international credentials in talks with President Reagan, Cabinet officials and Wall Street financial leaders. His basic message to Washington: that France, while approving in principle the “zero option” arms-control proposal, which calls for the removal of all U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range nuclear weapons from European soil, wants to be certain the two sides also achieve parity on shorter-range nuclear missiles. Chirac is expected to renew France’s commitment to the campaign against international terrorism, a gesture that is certain to be well received in Iranscam-shaken Washington. Chirac is also sure to voice Paris’ concern over the rising tide of U.S. protectionism (see interview).

U.S. officials responsible for protocol can be thankful that state visits like Chirac’s can be undertaken by either the Premier or the President — alone. Under the unwritten rules of cohabitation, more elaborate occasions, like last year’s Western economic summit in Tokyo, require the presence of both Chirac and Mitterrand. Though each scrupulously observes the courtesies due the other’s office, both expect to be received in equally grand style. They usually travel aboard separate aircraft, hold separate meetings with foreign leaders and are prickly about details, right down to the seating arrangements at banquets. The two leaders have learned to speak for France “with one voice from two mouths,” as a member of Chirac’s Cabinet puts it, but each makes sure that both mouths are heard.

Such rivalries were inevitable under cohabitation. The unusual arrangement came about because France’s constitution sets a seven-year presidential term but schedules parliamentary elections, which determine the choice of a Premier, at five-year intervals. Mitterrand, the only leftist to hold the presidency in the Fifth Republic, served the first five years of his term with a parliamentary majority and then lost it to Chirac’s center-right coalition in 1986. It was the first time that sequence of events had occurred. Mitterrand and Chirac cooperated well for a while, but lately political thrusts and parries between the two have grown testier and more frequent, as they position themselves for elections next spring, when the presidency and all 577 seats in the National Assembly will be up for grabs.

Two weeks ago, the duo got into an awkward and unseemly spat in Madrid during separate public appearances, each sniping at the other for past missteps in Franco-Spanish relations. When British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher flew to France last week to consult with the French prior to her visit with Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, she was received by Mitterrand near Caen instead of at the Elysee Palace in Paris. Why? Because Mitterrand wanted to keep Thatcher from seeing Chirac, as protocol would have required her to do if she had been invited to the capital.

Chirac, who served from 1974 to 1976 as Premier under conservative President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, took office this time in the Hotel Matignon with a razor-thin parliamentary majority of three and a legislative wish list that seemed endless. Within his first three months, he won passage of 34 bills, including measures that abolished the “wealth tax” on holdings of more than $500,000, stiffened immigration rules and allowed employers to lay off workers without first seeking government approval. One of the new Premier’s primary goals was to sell 65 government-owned companies and banks, worth a total of some $40 billion, to private investors. The rub: many of the concerns had been nationalized only five years earlier by Mitterrand.

Not surprisingly, the President flatly refused to sign a decree authorizing the huge privatization plan. It was one of four conservative measures Mitterrand actively sought to keep from becoming law. In each case, however, Chirac redrafted the decrees into legislative bills and won their passage in the National Assembly. The privatization program, which the Premier proudly calls economic democracy, became operational last July and has proved enormously popular. The first of 20 banks to be denationalized, Banque Paribas, brought $1.4 billion from no fewer than 3.8 million shareholders.

The state sell-off proved once and for all that cohabitation, for all its snags and clashes, does not necessarily prevent the incumbent government from its rightful exercise of power. Says Olivier Duhamel, a constitutional scholar at the University of Paris: “There is not a single policy that the Chirac government wanted to pursue and could not pursue because of Mitterrand.” That new fact of political life, moreover, is likely to leave a permanent mark on the French presidency. Says Duhamel: “In the future the President will be bound to accept that the Premier and the other ministers must have a role in decision making.”

Indeed, Chirac’s one genuine crisis during his year in office had nothing at all to do with power sharing. After students objected to a government bill calling for relatively modest changes in university admission standards and fees, the Premier stubbornly refused to reconsider his proposals. The students then took to the streets in December and staged four successive nights of rioting, in which an Algerian-born youth was killed in clashes with police. The violence ended when Chirac hastily withdrew the offending legislation. But the episode resulted in a painful loss of authority.

Economic events have not been much kinder to Chirac. Partly as the result of his own price-decontrol measures, inflation is now expected to rise from 2% to 2.8%, and his layoff bill helped kick unemployment up from 10% a year ago to 11% now, a fact that has not endeared Chirac to already wary labor unions. Overall economic growth is running at an anemic annual rate of 2%. In January, the accumulation of bad news sent the Premier’s popularity into a tailspin. From a peak of 51% last October, in the wake of his skillful handling of last fall’s terrorist-bombing campaign in Paris, Chirac’s approval rating sank to 39%; it now stands at 43%.

Perversely for Chirac, the popularity of both Mitterrand, 70, and the Premier’s rival within the center right, former Premier Raymond Barre, 62, has soared to more than 50% in the same period. Neither man has declared plans to run for next year’s presidential race, but both are likely candidates. Chirac’s supporters argue, correctly, that their man is a more forceful campaigner than either Mitterrand or Barre and that he can close the ratings gap on the hustings. But it is just possible, if Mitterrand does decide to stand for re-election, that voters could return him to office and then elect another center-right majority in the National Assembly. For Chirac, twice a bridesmaid but never a bride, that would be the ultimate irony.