M. ROCARD'S UMBRELLA

the lack of policy and competence in politics there

THE meaninglessness of it all is wonderful. The admirable complacency. How much more sophisticated can political leaders get than to send their voters to the polls four times in two months without a single issue?

French politicians might protest that there was an issue: leadership. And that is the smoothest of arguments. After all, everyone of them has already led. They're all old, all former Presidents or Prime Ministers. La Ronde has truly returned to France in its Third Republic form, ex- changing political leadership for political barons, who stand for little, but pass from one to the other the social disease of power-seeking.

There they are — Mitterrand, ex- Algerian War Interior Minister; Giscard, ex-Minister of Finance after the 1958 coup; Le Pen, ex-Poujadiste deputy and street fighter; Barre, a late starter but still a man who left the prime ministership close to a decade ago; and Chirac, theoretically still youngish, but twice ex-Prime Minister and scarred by uncountable vicious political battles. Even Rocard, the perpetual comer who has finally arrived, has run so many attempted coups on the leadership of the Socialist Party over the last two decades that his life resembles a circular tape of piped Muzak.

As the old barons change beds and pass the power, France is clearly adrift. Happily adrift? Dangerously adrift? Only a real crisis will clarify the situation.

In the meantime, nobody seems to mind that President Mitterrand doesn't have much of a programme. After all, if he had happened to have one, he would now lack a solid parliamentary majority to carry it out. If this does not bother the public, it seems to bother the President even less. Being a creature of power, he now has what he likes — power of the unencum- bered, manipulable kind.

An indication of just how bad things are is the return of Giscard d'Estaing as the leading spokesman for the Right. Giscard was and remains a discredited figure. Last year I went to hear him speak before a luncheon crowd of international lawyers, all of whom were on the Right. One could feel them straining not to throw buns at the ex-President as he extolled, in his strangely intelligent/idiotic way, the virtues of capi- talism. They all remembered how, as President, he had driven business after business into bankruptcy by creating ab- stract dirigiste policies which did not work.

If Giscard is the leading spokesman for the Right, it is only because his two rivals for the title have more recently discredited themselves. Jacques Chirac did not simply lose the last election. He lost it long before it was called, in fact, on 27 November 1986. That was the day his government over-reacted to some orderly, middle-class student demonstrations in Paris. The re- sulting street battles ended with the police beating to death a young Arab, who was a well-educated, model student, proud to be a French citizen, conservative and, worst of all, from the government's point of view, afflicted by severe medical problems. In other words, he was a patriotic, con- servative invalid.

In order to win an election in France you must carry both your own side and the centre. The death of that student lost Chirac the centre. From then on, it didn't matter whether he ran a good or a bad government. One can almost feel sorry for him. He is certainly more intelligent than Giscard and probably than Barre. He is civilised, car- ries a book of poetry in his pocket to read in spare moments, and would like to do the right thing. The problem is that he doesn't believe in anything, and therefore has no idea what that right thing might be. So long as all is calm, he makes a perfectly compe- tent leader. The moment there is a crisis, he panics and flails about ineptly. What he did between the two presidential votes compromise the international hostage situation; almost break off diplomatic rela- tions with an ally, Canada; get several score people killed in New Caledonia merely confirmed what most voters had known since the night Malik Oussekine was beaten to death in a lobby on the rue Monsieur Le Prince.

After losing the presidential election, Chirac went on making errors. Allowing the Gaullists in Marseille to ally themselves with Le Pen during the parliamentary rounds did little for his party locally and discredited him in the rest of the country. Now he has replaced his rather unpleasant acolyte — Jacques Toubon — as head of the Gaullist party with a hardliner, Alain Juppe. The sensible thing would have been a move towards the centre in order to hold his leadership of the unified Right. This could have been done by turning to some- one like Michel Noir, from Lyon, who stood up against Le Pen throughout the election.

The problem is that the Gaullist party has not had much to do with Gaullism since Chirac took it over. It is now, if anything, a party of the old classic Right — that is to say, a party standing for everything de Gaulle most hated.

As for poor Raymond Barre, his crushing defeat was the result of a series of misunderstandings. During the first six years of Mitterrand's presidency, Barre was the focal point for two groups — those who wanted a 'liberal', that is to say a free market economy, and those who wanted a classic right-wing approach to such things as nationalism and immigration. Why they thought Barre could give leadership on either of these fronts is a mystery. When he served as Giscard's Prime Minister, he was probably the most dirigiste government leader in the history of the Fifth Republic. He pushed private industry around in a way no one had before or has since dared to do again. On the other hand, he was always very open on racial questions and was a strong advocate of European unity. It was only in the last months before the presidential election that the reality of Barre began to strike home among his supporters. Then they rushed off to vote for Le Pen and for Chirac.

Even now, Barre remains a mysterious John the Baptist figure to both the political class and the public. Like de Gaulle, he marches to his own drummer; unlike de Gaulle, that drummer is profoundly egocentric. This is a man who saw his own father, a middle-class notable on the Indi- an Ocean island of La Reunion, marched up the main street of the capital, St Denis, in leg-irons to be jailed for fraud. The family was left penniless. The father was eventually freed and disappeared to Paris. The boy Raymond Barre grew up to be the incarnation of a perfect paternal figure. He also avoided seeing his own father again, even though the man was living and died in Paris while his son was Prime Minister of France. Amateur Freudian analysis is a dangerous thing, but M. Barre clearly sees himself as the authoritarian yet loving father of France.

The longevity of French politicians has always been one of the country's major problems. Giscard and Barre ought to retire. Chirac might limit himself to the Paris mayoralty, which is his right level of competence. The next generation ought to come forward — Michel Noir and Francois Leotard for a start. Instead, the current instability will provide the old guard with exactly the political tools they need in order to survive another term. Curiously enough, only a parliamentary majority on the Left might have forced the old guard on the Right to give up.

As for the Left, President Mitterrand could have had his parliamentary majority if only he had not been too clever by half. He should not have hurried Michel Rocard, just because the polls looked good. With more time and less pressure, Rocard might have managed some sort of real opening towards the centre. He could then have governed for six months before calling an election. Instead, Mitterrand was blinded by the dream of an immediate, easy win.

In many way, Mitterrand and Chirac were a perfect pair. Both are intelligent. Neither has a central motivation. Both of them, therefore, make major errors when under pressure. It is no wonder that they cohabited so successfully.

President Mitterrand does not seem to have learned many lessons from his first term. He is still surrounded by the kind of technocrats who have caused so much damage on both the Right and the Left young ambitious Enarques who don't be- lieve in much of anything. Watching Lau- rent Fabius come forward the other day as the successful Socialist candidate for the Speaker's chair brought all this to mind. Fabius was a disastrous Prime Minister. In fact, had Mitterrand at that time been able to resist his desire to promote manipulable young technocrats devoid of public sup- port, he might not have lost control of the Assembly in the middle of his first pres- idential mandate. And now Fabius is back in a key position, presiding over a split legislature.

Finally, there is the new Prime Minister. Michel Rocard, like Raymond Bane, has benefited for years from an unproved reputation. Like Bane, he has held to his own course. Now he will have a chance to prove himself. It is a moment of inverted existentialism. There is already a Rocard mythology. Now he will have to justify it through real actions. The deal he has done in New Caledonia is a good beginning. But however well he does, Rocard will be at the mercy of a president who does not like him. A man, what's more, whom he himself does not like.

I remember watching the two of them eight years ago at the World Socialist Congress in Vancouver. This was shortly before the French presidential election of 1981. Most people believed Mitterrand was finished. Rocard was attempting, yet again, to take over the Socialist party. The tension between the two men was visible to everyone in the hall. On the second even- ing of the congress, the French delegation came out of their hotel to go to dinner. It was dark and raining. The waiting cars had room for all of them except one. Mitter- rand and Rocard each wanted to sacrifice himself — as a leader should — and offered firmly to walk out alone into the storm. Rocard had a small folded umbrel- la, which Mitterrand grabbed and attemp- ted to open for protection during the walk ahead. The more he struggled, the smaller and more closed it seemed to become. Then Rocard grabbed it back, with the assurance of the technocrat, and began pushing the button, pulling the handle, shoving the shaft; all to no effect. I left them there, struggling with what they seemed to have focused on as a symbol of the state.

France has been dangerously without direction since the Greenpeace affair. If M. Rocard can give it a direction in such difficult conditions, he will be more than worth his mythology. But that seems un- likely. Only two weeks into his mandate, he panicked over a minor crisis provoked by the drug legalisation proposals of his new minister, Leon Schwarzenberg, the leading French cancerologist and the most famous doctor in France. Getting him into the government had been a great feat and a proof that Rocard was really moving to- wards the centre. Within days, he allowed Schwarzenberg to be publicly humiliated, to take the blame for the crisis, and to resign. This is hardly proof of the Prime Minister's leadership abilities.