FRANCE: Socialist Crisis

Most Social Democrats are irked by a chronic crisis of indecision: they cannot make up their minds whether they are primarily Socialists or Democrats. In France last week, the Continent’s key Social Democratic party split on this issue.

Led by a balding schoolteacher, Guy Mollet, and a phalanx of 60-odd associates, the left wing of the French Socialist Party rebelled against Léon Blum’s moderate, anti-Communist leadership. By a vote of 2,964-to-1,363 (with 145 abstentions), the annual Party Congress rejected the Executive Bureau’s activities report. General Secretary Daniel Mayer (a moderate) promptly resigned. Léon Blum pleaded with the rebels (“Participation of Communists in a government without any doubt serves the interests of Russia. It is not for us to enter into a government so that we could plant there little pockets of dynamite”). But Blum himself was rebuffed.

Then the left-wingers got to work on a program which they thought would remedy the party’s bad defeat last May (when it ran a poor third at the polls). Items: a more vigorous fight for nationalization; tougher demands for lower prices and higher wages; a new propaganda designed to appeal to women and young voters; an immediate end to the heresy of collaboration with the bourgeoisie, to be replaced by collaboration (though not fusion) with the Communists.

When the shouting was over, one of France’s strongest bulwarks against Communism had all but collapsed.