The failure of Raymond Barre
Sam White
Paris The third anniversary of Raymond Barre's Prime ministership has come and gone among such wailing and gnashing of teeth that it almost amounted to a period of national mourning. Here was the man, once hailed by President Giscard himself as 'the best economist in France' whose famous Elarre plan' was to place the French economy within a precisely stated three Year period on as sound a footing as the West German one, wading through jungles and quagmires of sprouting prices and spreading unemployment, and still pointing bray ely to an horizon which apparently only he can see. Indeed the Prime Minister s bland self-assurance and his contempt for bts critics are becoming his major handicaps in trying to save what is left of the considerable respect he once commanded. More and more he is beginning to sound like a peevish Professor chiding a backward class. It is, therefore, not surprising that the latest °Pinion polls give him a 'favourable' rating 0, f only 17 per cent and make it clear that, Just at the time when he will need all the support he can muster, he has losthis credibility. What is even more striking, however, is that some of his Cabinet colleagues are beginning to voice muted but nonetheless mutinous criticisms of him, and that, in addition, the entire French press has turned against him i . One rubs one's eyes n . One rubs one's eyes n disbelief when one reads, for examples in the Hersant-owned A urore , which has hitherto been his staunch supporter, that the last service that M. Barre can render the President is to offer his resignation.' The same note is being struck, though not so explicitly, by other Hersant publications. Of course one never knows with a presstycoon like Robert Hersant whether these attacks are due to his concern for the national interest or are the result of some disagreement with Giscard about more mundane matters; but the fact remains that, as far as the press is concerned, Barre is left without a friend in the world, Now, also, we are faced with the final evidence of the decline of public confidence in the govern ment: in the spectacular flight of the French middle classes to their old saviour in times of uncertainty gold and, more especially, the napoleon. Here we stumble on an ancient French phenomenon which under lines Barre's greatest failure, greater even than his inability to check inflation or unemployment. This is his failure to increase investment, which continues to stagnate although it was precisely on his ability to increase investment that the success or failure of his plan depended.
It is, of course, well known that the French individually own more gold than is privately owned in all the rest of Western Europe. They also own 70 per cent more gold than is held by the Bank of France, much the greater part of it in the form of napoleon coins. The latest estimate suggests that there are 550 million of these coins in the country, representing ten napoleons for each man, woman and child in the country or, roughly, an average of 27 napoleons for each family. And so the flight to gold, when it takes place in such a dramatic form as at present, is not just a matter of a few rich losing confidence but, rather, the. greater part of the nation. Asked recently if he would buy gold now, that ancient symbol of the French middle-class mentality in matters of money, Antoine Pinay replied that he would not. He did not say, however, that he would sell at the new record prices being 'offered and that, of course, is the essence of the question. And it must be remembered that he was talking only of the napoleon, whose price now is an extraordinary 34 per cent higher than an ordinary ounce of gold. There is, of course, the other side of the cdin (if I may put it that way) the industrial one. And here it is being proved once again how fortunate the French bourgeoisie is in having a powerful communist party. At the moment, for example, the prevailing communist-socialist split is accompanied by a trade union split, with the communist CGT waging as fierce a war against the other trade union federations as M. Mar chais is waging against M. Mitterrand.
Nevertheless, rarely has France faced a more morose period. Everything is more expensive, even the price of a baguette.
Already in August there has been a mammoth 48 hour railway strike an unpre cedented event and another is threatened next week. As far as politics is concerned, that old comedian, M. Mitterrand, is doing his shuffle dance, to the tune being played for him by Marchais. He is, therefore, making it more and more likely that the com munists will regain the position they so recently lost that of becoming once again the dominant party on the left And when Marchais talks about 'uniting with even the devil to defeat the government', he makes it clear at the same time that, as far as he is concerned, the lucky devil is not going to be Mitterrand. All this makes it difficult to predict the scale of political and, more important, industrial trouble which the government might have to face this autumn and winter. All that can be said with certainty is that the unions which the communists control, or in which they are a strong minority, will create the maximum trouble.
But all of this may obscure an essential fact -which is that M. Barre is not really the 'iron Chancellor' he likes to pretend to be. Indeed his major failing is that he has not been tough enough: he has put a lot of water in his vinegar. So much water, in fact, that between January 1977 and January 1979 wages in France rose more rapidly than they did in Britain, the Federal Republic or the 'United States. In other words, wage increases here have been, and remain, in excess of the rise in prices. This is, of course, the precise opposite of his stated objective. It is also the opposite of what has been happening in Germany, where the unions have in many cases accepted either a temporary cut in wages or a wage freeze. And so how long can Giscard continue to carry the weight of the political liability that Barre has become? Clearly it would be difficult to disavow policies which, in the last analysis, are the President's own. Especially if that also meant appointing someone who would water them down still further. So far the President has remained silent and so has, in a deafening fashion, his chief critic within the governing majority, Jacques Chirac, who has clearly taken the advice of some of his friends and decided to lie low for the time being. Only one voice of criticism is heard in the land, and it is that of the nation's current Cassandra, Michel Debit. He is also the only one to attack Barre, not for being too tough, but for not being tough enough. He has an audience, he is a Gaullist, and he is a fighter who does not engage in shadow boxing. Perhaps this former Prime Minister under General de Gaulle is about to fulfil de Gaulle's own prophecy for him that he is the man'in the reserve of the Republic'.
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