A Sincere Budget

A year ago, when inflationary tides threatened the booming French economy, up stepped French Finance Minister Valery Giscard d'Estaing to put his finger in the dike. "Every hole where inflation could infiltrate will be plugged," he promised. Shopwindows blossomed with yellow signs promising to hold the price line. Giscard cut back credit, let in a flood of foreign goods to boost competition. When both business and labor howled at the pinch, Giscard donned a V-neck sweater to make a soft-sell pitch on television direct to the thrifty French housewife.

Last week Giscard took to TV again to unveil the newest addition to his anti-inflation arsenal: for the first time in 34 years, France will have a balanced budget in 1965. Moreover, he reported, the stabilization plan had cut the consumer-price-index increase in one year to 2.9% v. the 4.9% rise the year before without any appreciable brake on the economy's overall growth. In the new budget, government credits for badly needed superhighways will increase by 26%, investment in France's antiquated telephone system will go up 11.5% and minimum old-age pensions will be boosted by 12.5% .

Gaullist critics were quick to complain about the manner of the budget's presentation (to the public rather than to Parliament first), but few dared to challenge the facts and figures of what Giscard calls "a sincere balanced budget, without any tricks or guile." In the land of Descartes, where the class prize begins in kindergarten and the race is to the swiftest synopsis, the elegant, aristocratic Giscard has been winning prizes all his life as the fastest brain in town. Born to wealth and name, Giscard zipped through France's best schools, became a member of the elite inspecteurs des finances, was only 35 when De Gaulle named him Finance Minister in 1962.

Hardly the stuffy image of a traditional French Cabinet minister, Giscard skis, swims, pilots a plane, has even been known to ride the Paris subway to work. Hardly even a Gaullist for that matter, Giscard heads his own 35-man Republican Independent Party in Parliament. Today it provides the Gaullist coalition its effective majority. When De Gaulle is gone, it could become the base upon which Giscard might mount his own campaign for the last big prize left: the presidency of France.

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