FRANCE: Pause Wins

The second poll in France’s nationwide election for municipal councilors (TIME, Oct. 18), confirmed last week the first results tabulated fortnight ago, proved two things: 1) the Radical Socialist Party of Premier Camille Chautemps. a party which is not radical but studiously middleclass, still polls more votes in local elections than any other; 2) the Socialist Party of Vice

Premier Léon Blum, which is an actual Socialist party and polled most votes in the national election last year, has not repeated this triumph in the local balloting. This meant that the French “New Deal,” introduced under M. Blum when he became Premier in 1936, has now lost the wide appeal it had at first. French voters seem predominantly satisfied by the way in which Premier Chautemps has sidetracked the New Deal at the point of radical progress it had reached when the Blum Cabinet fell (TIME, June 28 et seq.). This policy canny M. Chautemps calls “the pause” and it was this which won last week.