WHO'S AFRAID OF M. LE PEN?

Sam White reports on the

cleansing of the French Right by Mitterrand's victory

Paris PRESIDENT Mitterrand's easy victory in the final round of the French presidential elections has acted like a balm on wounds that the French voters inflicted on them- selves when they gave the extreme Right leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, 15 per cent of the vote in the first round and set him up as a would-be arbitrator of the outcome of last Sunday's final vote.

Who is afraid of M. Mitterrand? And who, for that matter, is still afraid of Le Pen? M. Mitterrand's victory has not even caused a tremor on the highly sensitive Paris Bourse. As for Le Pen, Chirac's defeat has also been his own and cost him any hope of becoming a power broker on the Right and attaining the political respec- tability he so much sought. In the after- math of last Sunday's vote the French can pick themselves up and dust themselves down and present a respectable front both to themselves and the rest of the world.

What then is Le Pen's future? He will be shunned by the moderate Right, and it will be the moderate Right led by people like Raymond Barre and former President Gis- card which will now have the whip hand in the ranks of the opposition. People like the former minister of the interior M. Charles Pasqua who were most likely to try to do a deal with Le Pen have now been frozen out because they are generally held responsible by their acts and by their words for Chirac's disastrously poor showing. Not only did Pasqua's last-minute spectacular rescue of hostages in Lebanon and New Caledonia fail to get votes for Chirac but it may even have been poSitively counter- productive because of its obvious election timing.

To revert to Le Pen, however, it is noticeable that he scored best in Marseille and Strasbourg, and there too Mitterrand achieved his highest votes. Indeed Mitter- rand led in almost every region of France except in distant and troubled New Cale- donia where he will face problems in bringing the local colonial lobby to heel. Furthermore, Le Pen faces the prospect of heavy losses in the parliamentary elections which are certain to follow later this year. Public opinion polls are already predicting that his overall vote will drop to nine per cent as against the 15 per cent he polled two Sundays ago. Then too his parliamen- tary representation is certain to be greatly reduced because this time the parliamen- tary elections will be held under the old first-past-the-post constituency system, in- stead of proportional representation, which served him so well in 1986. All this should put him on the sidelines for the time being and reduce him to at least the marginal status of the French Communist Party for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile Chirac will be kept under strict surveillance not only by his more moderate allies but also by many members of his own neo-Gaullist party, who have been choking with indignation over appa- rent overtures to Le Pen. They have publicly declared that they would rather lose an election than win it with Le Pen as an ally. M. Chirac's greatest mistake, however, was to engage in a battle with a phantom Mitterrand dubbed a dangerous socialist, who once elected would return to the policies he had himself abandoned two years after his 1981 victory. This made unconvincing electioneering, which be- came more hysterical as its lack of credibil- ity became more and more evident.

I am writing this before M. Mitterrand's 'My fellow Aquarians.' choice of prime minister is known, but, whoever it may be, it will be someone who can muster at least a vote of confidence from the present National Assembly and avoid an immediate dissolution. The new opposition transformed by defeat will be a 'loyal' one, which will not lightly overturn a government. Any notion that M. Mitter- rand, because he has been re-elected on a programme consisting of little more than platitudes, has in effect been given a blank

cheque by the electorate is, as Serge July points out in Liberation, a grotesque mis- understanding.

He has in fact been entrusted with a mission to bridge the ideological divide in France much as it was bridged during the two years of cohabitation with M. Chirac, by creating a coalition government which will include both Socialists and representa- tives of the moderate Right. To quote July: `Anything about Mitterrand's victory which suggests a revenge of the Left on the Right compromises the future.' The future, he suggests, lies in a new form of cohabita- tion, but this time on a much higher level and based on much deeper foundations. Again citing July, when Giscard at his last meeting with Chirac advised him to try to bring together the two opposing halves of France, he was in fact giving credit to Mitterrand for having made this his fun- damental objective.

Politically this is already beginning to happen, as such moderate leaders of the Right as Barre, Giscard and Mme Simone Weil begin to stake out their own territory in the wake of the political hurricane of the past few weeks. They are making it clear that they will defend their ground against the bigoted would-be intruders to their right. The newly re-constructed Left has shed both its Communist allies and its Marxist dogmas. Allied to Barre and others, it will provide a secure barrier

against. the incursions of Le Pen and Le Penism. Le Pen may have contributed

heavily to Chirac's defeat, but, by horrify- ing the greater part of France, he has also contributed heavily to Mitterrand's vic- tory. Possibly in a year or two's time Le

Pelf will in retrospect cut as ludicrous a figure as General Boulanger did after his

failed attempt to woo France at the turn of the century, or more recently the shop- keepers' champion, Pierre Poujade. Meanwhile one hopes that the cries of outrage in the British press over the released French hostages will die down. M.

Mitterrand made his own efforts to do a deal over the hostages in Lebanon and, as for the woman agent whom Chirac sprung from her Pacific island exile after the Greenpeace affair, it should be remem- bered that, though her rescue may have

been undertaken by Chirac, the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior was carried out

under a Socialist government. If anyone should have been impeached as a result it was President Mitterrand himself and his defence minister, M. Charles Hernu.