France Mitterrand’s Short Coattails

President Francois Mitterrand had tried at first to remain above the parliamentary election battle. The 71-year-old Socialist, after all, had won re-election handily only five weeks earlier largely by promising to bring a measure of consensus to a confrontational style of politics. Last week, though, as a desultory legislative campaign suddenly turned into the traditionally bitter left-right duel, Mitterrand decided it was time to intervene on behalf of the embattled left. “I ask Frenchwomen and Frenchmen to confirm the vote they delivered in the second round of the presidential election last May 8,” he declared at his weekly Cabinet meeting. “To carry out my mission, I need a stable majority.”

As French voters queued up at the ballot boxes on Sunday, it appeared that they were ready to oblige the President. Weekend polls gave the Socialists a projected margin of ten to 25 seats beyond the 289 needed for a majority. Although no one was ruling out the possibility of an upset by the conservatives, it appeared the Socialists were more successful at getting out the vote. For Premier Michel Rocard, a moderate Socialist whose government includes a few non-Socialists, a clear majority would mean that he could finally present the National Assembly with a legislative program intended to prepare the French economy for Europe’s integrated market of 1992.

Mitterrand’s last-minute presidential plunge into the campaign reflected real Socialist fears that the French electorate, apparently in an unpredictable mood, was capable of anything — including the return of a conservative majority. The Socialists, who initially expected a landslide victory on the strength of Mitterrand’s electoral momentum, faltered in the first round of balloting on June 5. The party won only 37.5% of the vote, compared with 40.5% for the conservative alliance comprising the neo-Gaullist Rassemblement pour la Republique and the center-right Union pour la Democratie Francaise. The Communists, written off after their 6.8% score in the presidential race, bounced back to 11.3%. At the other extreme, the ultra- right, anti-immigrant National Front slipped from 14.5% to 9.7%.

Most intriguing, however, was the 34% abstention rate in the first round, a figure unequaled in the history of France’s Fifth Republic. Clearly, the electorate was weary of politics after three trips to the polls in six weeks and almost a year of campaign maneuvering. In the presidential balloting, the voters had thoroughly surprised the pollsters, pundits and politicians. Few had expected Mitterrand’s solid 54%-to-46% victory over Chirac, who resigned as Premier following his presidential defeat.

At the outset of the parliamentary election campaign, Mitterrand had tried to explain his “political opening” by saying that “it is not healthy to have a country governed by just one party. There should be other political families taking part in government.” But less than two weeks later, the President was pleading for a Socialist majority. What had changed? The emergence, said Mitterrand, of a new threat to the “values of freedom, equality and respect for others.” That danger, suggested the President, was implicit in the electoral deal struck in Marseilles between the xenophobic National Front and the mainstream conservative alliance.

“A pact with the devil,” said Interior Minister Pierre Joxe, a Socialist. At a rally before 8,000 supporters in a Paris sports stadium, Premier Rocard and Socialist Party Secretary Pierre Mauroy called the accord an “inadmissible act that obviously has national implications.” Conservative leaders defended the Marseilles move by arguing that without it the Socialists would have carried off 15 of the 16 seats at stake in the area.

The Marseilles accord dominated the campaign between the two rounds of voting, as party politicians haggled and bargained before Sunday’s final decisive contest. Under the French system, any candidate with more than 12.5% of the vote in the first round can stay in the race. In 455 of the country’s 577 constituencies, no candidate emerged with a majority in the first round, which left plenty of room for horse trading. By agreement between the Socialists and the Communists, the trailing candidate from the two parties regularly stepped aside in favor of the one more likely to win. The same kind of arrangement with Jean-Marie Le Pen, though, stirred controversy at a time when the issue of racism in France has become particularly sensitive.

In a get-out-the-vote drive at the Socialists’ Paris rally, Rocard and Mauroy dramatized the risks of the right’s returning to power. As green laser beams crisscrossed the stadium and a 50-ft. projection of Mitterrand played upon a giant backdrop, Mauroy cried, “The right must be beaten back.” Rocard urged the supporters darkly, “Let’s look lucidly at the results of the first ballot — the risk exists!”

Politicians generally were mystified by the first round. Rocard attributed the relatively poor Socialist showing to widespread complacency bred by opinion polls that had predicted a sizable majority for the President’s party. Another reason was probably voter discontent with the Socialists for failing to broaden their political base by bringing more centrists into the government.

One lesson of the campaign may be that in the heat of the electoral battle, the old polarizing instincts proved stronger than all the talk of concord and consensus. Rocard, who had earlier called for an “opening of hearts and spirits,” wound up evoking the threat of a rightist victory and starkly warning, “The choice is between me and Chirac.” For his part, Chirac rejected the proffered “opening” as so much hypocritical “window dressing to cover a precipitous election.” Perhaps it was former Premier Raymond Barre who best summed up the mood of the electorate in the wake of Mitterrand’s calls for a measure of U.S.-style bipartisanship. Speaking at a rally south of Paris, Barre declared, “The French people want an end to our political wars of religion.” Making that kind of peace may prove to be the greatest — and most elusive — challenge facing the new government.