Man of Action

Three years ago, in a runaway bestseller entitled The American Challenge, French Publisher Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, 46, warned that Europeans had better start taking some swift action. The reason, he explained, was not only to head off the massive invasion of Europe by U.S. corporations but, more importantly, to restore the Continent's own waning dynamism. Servan-Schreiber has followed his own advice. Branching out into politics, he has displayed a dynamism that has marked him as an important new force in France's national life.

Running in Nancy as an independent candidate in a by-election for the National Assembly, Servan-Schreiber last week finished a strong first in a field of six. J-J S-S took 45% of the total vote v. 27% for the runner-up Gaullist candidate and 19% for the Communist candidate. Since he seemed likely to inherit many of the votes that would have gone to eliminated leftist candidates, he looked virtually certain to emerge the winner in this week's three-way runoff balloting.

One reason Servan-Schreiber chose to run in South Lorraine is that it is a case study of what is wrong with France. There has been a decline in industry; workers commute daily across the border to work for higher wages in Germany; unemployment is climbing.

Servan-Schreiber waged the style of campaign that has won him the nickname "the French Kennedy." He rented a house in Nancy and set up his bustling campaign headquarters in the Grand Hotel. His newsweekly L'Express --from which he technically resigned as editor--faithfully reported his campaign with a cover story and a number of long J-J S-S interviews.

On the Lorraine hustings, Servan-Schreiber traveled in a rented Renault taxi, stopping in bars and cafes to chat endlessly with local residents. Playing on the bruised regional feelings of South Lorraine, which feels forgotten by Paris-based politicians, Servan-Schreiber hit hard on a theme that stressed the area's potential for economic development.

Servan-Schreiber hopes that the platform of the National Assembly, combined with the voice of L'Express, whose domestic political coverage he will continue to oversee, will enable him to mobilize French public opinion. One aim: to organize the now splintered non-Communist parties of the left into an alternative to the Gaullist regime of Georges Pompidou. In the past, Servan-Schreiber sometimes confessed that his ambition was to some day be President of France. No more. Sensing the revival of Europe's oft-delayed trend toward closer economic and political integration, Servan-Schreiber has raised his sights. "I just want to be one of those European commissars," he says.

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