The worst of both worlds?
FRANCE MARC ULLMANN
Paris—At ten past ten last Sunday evening M Maurice Couve de Murville was declared defeated. Half an hour later a spokesman for General de Gaulle told journalists at the Elysee Palace that the foreign minister would keep his job: 'the President of the Republic wishes to emphasise,' he said, 'that there will be no change in French foreign policy.' At eleven o'clock Couve himself told his friends —who would, of course, repeat it—that he could in no circumstances go on: 'I need not have stood in the elections,' he said, 'but since I did, I must play the game. Besides,' he added, 'it would not be good for France to be repre- sented by a loser.'
Will he stay or not? That is the most popu- lar guessing-game in Paris this week. It con- cerns not only Couve, who failed by 245 votes out of an electorate of 40,000. Three other ministers were beaten: M Messmer, the mini- ster for defence (by 2,410 votes), M Sanguinetti, minister for ex-servicemen (by 166) and M Charbonnel, minister for overseas coopera- tion (by 417).
These, of course, are minor problems. Far more immediate is the overall result of the elections: the Gaullists have obtained 244 seats in the National Assembly out of a total of 487 (the result in Tahiti is not yet known). Their majority is thus reduced to the absolute mini- mum—one, or perhaps three, votes. What is more, within the Gaullist majority the influ- ence of M Valery Giscard d'Estaing has in- creased: while the orthodox Gaullists lost some forty seats, the `Giscardiens' gained ten. This is clearly a factor which will play its part in the reapportioning of portfolios. Above all, it is a sign of the way France is thinking today: the modern wing of the Gaullist parties has shown itself more attractive to the electorate than the more disciplined majority, more attractive even than M Lecanuet's Centre party which ineptly gave the impression of taking up the middle ground simply to sell itself to the highest bidder.
Another sign, too, is very important: people are no longer frightened of the Communists. If one compares the results of the second ballot very closely with what the opinion polls were predicting, it can be seen that the pollsters made only one mistake. They gave too many votes to the Gaullists and not enough to the Com- munists. The reason is that they based their predictions on the lesson of all earlier elections that, when faced with a choice between a Gaul- list candidate and a Communist, the non- Communist left divided almost equally between them. This time 80 per cent of their votes went to the Communists and only 20 per cent to the Gaullists. There has been nothing like it in France since 1936—that is, not since the popular front government of Leon Blum.
General de Gaulle has himself been partly responsible for this development: his policy of rapprochement with the Soviet Union has made it easier for the Communists to emerge from their ghetto, while his insistence on keeping the reins of power himself has led to a polarisation between left and right in French politics.
M Francois Mitterand, leader of the non- -Communist left, and his friends believe that this state of affairs is here to stay. Little by little, they argue, the left ought to be able to weld itself together until it is capable of forming a majority. In their eyes, half the journey—the harder half, that of overcoming the psycho- logical barrier—has already been completed. Now it is up to the Communists to take the chance that is offered to them of abandoning the more doctrinaire parts of their pro- gramme.
According to the non-Communists, they are already on the right track. An example of the new Communist style used in these elections was that the party posters no longer portrayed the traditional muscular working man but a distinctly middle-class young couple. And for the first time the Communist newspapers actu- ally bought advertising time on commercial radio.
On the other hand, to M Gaston Defferre, the mayor of Marseilles and one of the strong men of the Socialist party, such an analysis is com- pletely wrong. 'In the first ballot,' he argues, `the Communists won more votes than the non- Communist left. So long as the Communists can do this, there is no chance that the party will change very much. When General de Gaulle goes, the new majority will be made up of a vast party of the Centre-left to which many Gaullists will rally.'
When General de Gaulle goes. . . . That is the great unknown. The new assembly which will last for the next five years will surely be the executor of the last will and testament of le grand Charles. Already everyone is thinking about it: Giscard d'Estaing who dreams of a huge Conservative party pushing its antennae out towards the centre, and a left, whether united or not, still in the minority; Gaston Defferre who envisages a Centre party holding on to power and avoiding extremes; Francois Mitterand who believes in the pendulum theory of politics and thinks that thirteen years of Gaullism can only lead to a swing in the oppo- site direction.
At present, however, the key lies with General de Gaulle himself. His official majority of one has nothing in common with Mr Wilson's small majority between 1964 and 1966, for some twenty deputies have been elected who belong to no party at all and a good third of them will vote with the Gaullists. Besides, French parlia- mentary procedure favours the government. On the one hand, members do not have to be present in order to vote: voting is electronic and those who are away can entrust their vote to those who are there. Yet, on the other hand, the procedure for a censure motion is very exacting: for a government to be overthrown the motion must be approved by an absolute majority of all votes; an abstention is counted as a vote in favour of the government.
So the immediate issue is no longer the stability of Gaullism but how Gaullism will find new bearings. The danger is that President de Gaulle will stick to the foreign policy which he holds so dear, but that, in order to regain public support, he will allow himself to be led into too soft an economic policy at home. The worst of both worlds, in fact.
Previous page
