France's third force
Sam White
Paris One has to go back to the early 'fifties to find the kind of de facto alliance that is being forged between Gaullists and Communists on the eve of the French general election this March. Both feel that they will provide the essential dynamism for the victory of the left or right in the elections yet both feel that, whichever side wins, the fruits of victory will go to others and not to them. In short, their strong and not unreasonable suspicions are that, if the right wins, the Gaullists will be squeezed out of power in favour of a centrist-left coalition, a kind of reincarnation of the third force of the 'fifties: and the Communists feel that if the left wins a deal between President Giscard and the left-wing radicals — to say nothing of some Socialists — is already in the works. That this in fact is Giscard's dearest ambition is now an open secret. He himself never ceases to proclaim that France must be governed
• from the centre, just as he never ceases to deplore the division of France into two electoral blocs. A member of his government, the leader of that body of French bourgeois opinion which remains staunchly European, Atlanticist and anti-Gaullist M. Lecanuet, states bluntly that Giscard's dearest wish is to govern with the Socialist leader M. Mitterrand as his prime minister.
If the election results are close, as they seem almost certain to be at the moment, and the Communists refuse to join a Socialist-led government (again, a virtual certainty) then arithmetically the whole idea of a third force government could become feasible. Politically however it remains more than dubious. Nobody doubts that the left radicals will scurry to join Giscard after such an electoral outcome but whether Mitterrand could conceivably join them remains unlikely in the extreme. He has committed himself too emphatically to be able to do so, but some of his colleagues in his own three-way divided party may feel under no obligation to refuse. I am thinking particularly of one of his chief financial advisers, M. Michel Rocard, and the Mayor of Marseilles, M. Gaston Defferre. But there are more serious obstacles to such a coalition and they are that it would inevitably run into heavy political and industrial weather.
The Gaullists would harrass it in par
liament, and the Communists in and out of parliament. Meanwhile the great work Mitterrand has accomplished in restoring the French Socialist Party as the major party of the left would be destroyed. That party would become irretrievably split. Oddly enough the most interesting evidence of Giscard's intentions is provided by President Carter's recent three-day visit to France. The visit was, from Giscard's point of view, an outstanding success. It projected him exactly in the light he wishes to be seen, and distributed the favours and disfavours exactly as Giscard wished them to be dealt out. Thus for himself the long-running feud with Washington seemed to have been settled on terms entirely favourable to France. France's independent role in diplomacy and defence was recognised, and even blessed as an asset to the strength of the western world. Even such disputes over the wayward behaviour of the dollar were momentarily stilled by Carter's action in issuing instructions from Paris for the US Treasury to check its decline.
Furthermore Carter was persuaded to snub Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist leader and mayor of Paris, and see Mitterrand. The very words Carter used to Mitterrand might have been written for him by Giscard. Of course they were not, but they were certainly rehearsed for Giscard's benefit and won his approval. Hence the official leak. In his greeting to Mitterrand Carter spoke of US disquiet over a Socialist alliance with the Communists — an alliance of course which is now in ruins — and praised Mitterrand for his 'beneficial influence' on French political life. It was a shrewd Giscard-Carter move destined to mildly embarrass Mitterrand and to deepen the Socialist-Communist split just on the eve of the Communist Party's national congress in Paris. Whether the snub to Chirac was a wise one is another matter, for here he is risking making precisely the same mistake as he made in the municipal elections a year ago.
The mistake he made then was to wage a war on two fronts both against the Gaullists and the then flourishing Socialist Communist alliance. The result was that he lost on both. Furthermore by adopting this attitude he lays himself open to a series of contradictions: he cannot convincingly both attack the Socialist programme through his prime minister M. Barre as a peace of wild demagogy and at the same time envisage inviting the chief architect of that programme to join his government. Such an attitude both confuses the electorate and demoralises his natural followers.
In fact, far from being in any sense 'liberated' by the Communist breakaway from
the former union of the left Mitterrand is beginning to look more and more like the prisoner of the Communists and of his own left. Thus he has now adopted many of the key objectives set out in the revised Communist version of the 1972 common programme including the most controversial of all — an immediate 32 per cent increase in the basic wage. This would lead to an immediate generalised wage increase of not less than 20 per cent and was denounced, when first proposed by the Communists, by the socialist spokesman on financial affairs, M. Rocard, as 'highly dangerous'. But no amount of concessions will win from the Communists the most prized concession of all — an electoral agreement between the two parties to stand down in Nvour of the better-placed candidate of the two in the second round of voting. This the Communists have made clear they will only consider if they themselves poll a minimum of 25 per cent of the vote in the first round. The chances of them doing so are virtually negligible and indeed they will be lucky if they match the 21 per cent they got in the 1974 presidential election. Meanwhile a new and highly inflammatory issue has been introduced into the campaign with allegations that the votes of overseas Frenchmen are being rigged in favour of the government majority. Last July parliament voted without any opposition a new law aimed at facilitating voting procedures for voters living outside metropolitan France.
This would enable them to vote by proxy in any constituency of their choosing but on condition that the population in the con stituency of the choice amounted to a minimum of 30,000 and that the overseas vote in such a constituency did not amount to more than two per cent of the total. This vote incidentally is not by its nature a homogeneously conservative one for it includes a large number of schoolteachers and young conscripts who prefer to do their military service by undertaking social work in France's former African colonies. Now embassy and consular officials in parts of Africa and more especially in Gabon and the Ivory Coast have been caught red handed not only advising locals to vote 'usefully' by voting in marginal constituencies but even going to the point of collecting authorised blank voting papers and dispatching them to party organisers, mainly Gaullist, in France.
The scandal is enormous and the stupidity of those who have lent themselves to this task monumental. It can mean that in a close election the results themselves can be placed in doubt. It is also a flagrant breach of the law governing the secrecy of an individual's vote, and potentially mischievous.
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