Chirac: Rousing the Gaullist Ghost

Charles de Gaulle liked to believe that all Frenchmen at heart were Gaullists, ready to respond instantly to his mystic brand of nationalism in times of travail--provided, of course, that the call to glory came from an inspired and iron-willed leader. Last week a generally disgruntled French populace awoke to the clarion of a familiar bugle, and lo, it was playing their song.

The man with the horn was not that elegantly patrician occupant of the Elysee Palace, President Valery Giscard d'Estaing (who is, after all, not even a Guallist, but a member of the small Independent Republican Party). The bugler was the impatient, youngish Guallist, Jacques Chirac, who only 3% months ago angrily quit as Premier because he felt that Giscard had failed to halt the march of the left in France. Now Chirac was issuing a call to arms that would have pleased De Gaulle: he announced the grand reformation of the moribund Guallist party, formed his battalions and declared war on the left. In so doing, he challenged Giscard for the leadership of the governing majority.

The great pronouncement was revealed in the form of the consecration of Chirac himself as the new strongman of Gaullism, and it was celebrated at a masterfully staged political extravaganza. The name of the old party, U.D.R. (Union des Democrates pour la Republique), was changed to the Assembly for the Republic (Rassemblement pour la Republique).* Seventy thousand Guallist supporters--the biggest political convention ever--were brought to Paris' Porte de Versailles exhibition hall by ten special trains, 300 buses and charter flights from all over the country. It was an excited, happy crowd of all ages, of men and women, many wearing tri-color emblems or buttons that read: CHIRAC, I BELIEVE IN HIM (Chirac, J'Y Crois). Drawn by the old French hunger for strong chieftains, they had come more for the man himself than for the party. Said a truck driver, beaming: "If we are called, it's because we are needed." An old farmer remembered: "We stopped the Reds in 1924 this way."

Shee-Rack! Climaxing a day-long orgy of pride and peroration, Chirac stood atop an immense podium, his arms outstretched in the large V popularized by De Gaulle. "Let us restore hope to our country!" he shouted to the throng. Like tiny flashes of lightning, the reflections of strobe lights glittered on his large glasses while his followers cried over and over, "Shee-rack! Shee-rack!"

There was a sense of political irony as well as holy resurrection. Two and a half years ago, in an act of brutal pragmatism, Chirac rejected his own party's Guallist candidate, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, in the French presidential elections and threw his support to Giscard, the more likely winner. Now Chirac was promising to lead the Gaullists out of the wilderness, to save France from the man he had helped elect.

The falling-out between Giscard and Chirac was inevitable. The fundamental conflict focused on the problem of the rising strength of the Socialist-Communist alliance. Chirac had lost patience with Giscard's ineffectual attempt to woo the moderate Socialists with a program of reforms aimed at reshaping France into an "advanced liberal democracy." The trouble was that the reforms were too mild to win support from the left and too strong to please Giscard's conservative support.

For example, Chirac found himself defending a capital gains tax that his own party vehemently opposed. Giscard's failure to halt inflation or cut record unemployment only exacerbated France's growing mood of anxiety and drift. The result: a steady drain of confidence in Giscard's ability to govern, which strengthened the left. Chirac wanted to force a new election by dissolving the National Assembly and waging a tough anti-Communist campaign for a new Parliament; Giscard refused to risk a confrontation that would split France along ideological lines; rebuffed, Chirac quit (TIME, Sept. 6).

As Chirac told Paris Bureau Chief Gregory Wierzynski, "General de Gaulle taught us that a politician can act only if he has the consensus of the electorate. As Premier I did not wish to govern France if the belief that we represented a majority was contested. There was only one way to prove our legitimacy."

Within a week of resigning from the government, Chirac charted a comeback. The old Gaullist party, without a President or a Premier for the first time in 18 years, was in disarray. The Gaullists .needed Chirac as much as he needed them. "We would have faced a party crisis within six months," says Yves Guena, now head of the new R.P.R.'s political section. "Chirac offered an adventure, and between slow death and adventure, I chose adventure."

Chirac's first task will be to build a nationwide political organization staffed by his own men, equipped with computers and other modern electioneering techniques. But the basic thrust of the new party is to appeal to the disillusioned shopkeepers, small businessmen, clerks, office employees and workers who have been turning to the Socialists. For months, polls have shown the Socialist-Communist strength at 52%, enough for a parliamentary majority if the election were held today. "We will succeed," says Guena, "only if we can recuperate the lower-middle-class vote that used to go to General de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou." Patriotism, the Gaullists hope, will once again cut across all classes. "Chirac is building his Assembly on the nation," says Jean Charlot, an eminent historian of Gaullism. "Giscard could not build an Assembly on the idea of Europe."

No Crisis. Chirac cannot go too far in opposing Giscard without triggering a confrontation that would only weaken the government majority and benefit the left. Moreover, much of the pending legislation in the Assembly was hatched while Chirac was still Premier; this blunts any credible Gaullist opposition to these measures. But the Gaullists will stay arms-length from the President from now on. They may oppose direct elections to a European parliament and object to ratifying the International Monetary Fund accords reached last January in Jamaica, an agreement they view as symptomatic of Giscard's shift to supranationalism. Beyond these skirmishes, the two men are, in the words of Historian Chariot, "condemned to get along." Chirac told Wierzynski, "I will not flail in all directions in an irresponsible manner. So long as there is no major change in the policies of France, so long as I am in the majority, I have no intention of provoking a crisis."

That promise may be hard to keep. The government, for example, chose the day of Chirac's convention to expel striking printers who had been occupying the plant of the daily newspaper Le Parisien Libere for nearly 22 months. The expulsion provoked a nationwide printers' strike, denying Chirac much-needed publicity about his triumph at Porte de Versailles.

Chirac is looking to the legislative elections now scheduled for March 1978. If his clout is decisive in blocking the left from achieving a majority in Parliament, Chirac, the strongman of the majority, will overshadow Giscard and quite possibly unseat him in the 1981 presidential election. At the very least, he has already rekindled the potent mystique of Charles de Gaulle.

*De Gaulle's old 1947 movement was called the Rassemblement du Peuple Franc,ais.

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