Once More to the Polls

"It will not be pleasant to hold power in 1978"

Not since 1968, when millions of students and workers erupted in a violent protest that brought France to a virtual standstill, had the Fifth Republic wavered so precariously on a political pinpoint. Challenging the center-right government of President Valery Giscard d'Estaing was the combined appeal of an alliance of Socialists and Communists. All the nation's polling organizations had predicted that the leftists would come out on top in the first of two Sunday rounds of parliamentary elections. Then, with the left having gained momentum from a first-round victory, the second round of balloting, held on March 19, could paralyze Giscard's presidency and gravely damage France's economy.

But in the first round, at least, the voters of France had trooped to the polls in record numbers to give an unexpected boost to Giscard's coalition, confounding pollsters and causing discreet jubilation in most democratic capitals of the world. When those votes were counted, the Socialist, Communist and Left Radical alliance had failed to gain a majority, lagging 1.2%, or 334,213 votes, behind the center-right coalition headed by Giscard and Gaullist Leader Jacques Chirac. A number of ultraleftist parties not affiliated with the coalition polled 952,661 votes. Although the Socialist-Communist alliance could conceivably recoup its losses and in the second round gain a small majority of seats in the National Assembly, its chances of radically transforming French society were now remote.

Still, center-right politicians were careful not to issue triumphal statements, for fear of inducing voter apathy. "The main lesson of the first round is that the French were not deceived by the demagogic promises with which the left hoped to seduce them," said Premier Raymond Barre, adding prudently that "nothing is lost, but nothing is won yet." Although the leftist momentum had been arrested, there were a number of constituencies where the second-round election would be decided by the narrowest of margins. "If just a few of our supporters decide to go fishing on March 19, we could still lose," declared a centrist campaign aide. To prevent a diminution of the 29 million first-round turnout, 15 center-right Cabinet ministers stormed the hustings.

Meanwhile, analysts were sifting through the first-round results for clues of why the outcome, to everybody's surprise, showed the left to be in perilous trouble. Many pointed to the false expectations generated by France's public opinion polls. For more than a year, they had consistently predicted that the leftist coalition plus the ultras would win 50% to 52% of the popular vote as against 45% for the combined center-right parties. But the left coalition actually trailed the center-right, 45.3% v. 46.5%.

The first indications that the practitioners of that inexact science had overestimated the left's strength came only minutes after the first-round polls closed. It was obvious that the left's early lead was fast shrinking to invisibility. Computers tallying the vote on television soon made it clear that the leftist upset was caused by an unexpectedly poor showing by the Socialists. Watching TV in a hotel in Burgundy, Socialist Leader Franc,ois Mitterrand turned to an aide and asked, "Is that really all?" Shortly thereafter, Mitterrand appeared on television to concede that "we expected to do better."

That was an understatement. The Socialists originally had figured on winning more than 25% of the ballots, and Mitterrand had repeatedly proclaimed that his party would garner at least 7 million votes. Instead, his candidates captured only 22.6%, and the party fell a half-million votes short of its goal. The Communists fared no better than they had in past elections. Their share: 20.6%.

On the other side of the barricades, the center-right parties scarcely experienced a first-round landslide. Of the 46.5% total, Chirac's Gaullists won 22.6%, giving the rightists a tiny edge of 1,320 votes over the Socialists as France's leading party. At the same time, Giscard, Chirac's rival in the center-right coalition, scored a modest success as a result of the surprisingly strong 21.5% showing of the Union pour la Democratie Franc,aise a group of three small non-Gaullist parties that the President stitched together last month. The group pulled in more than 6 million votes--1 million over target.

The message was clear: France's uneasy electorate, fed up with squabbling on the left, uncertain of the dimensions of Communist intentions, played safe. "I expected as much," said Giscard coolly, as he watched first-round returns from the presidential Chateau de Rambouillet, 34 miles from Paris, "I didn't speak Saturday night for nothing." He was referring to a persuasive election-eve address on national television. A victory for the deeply divided leftist parties could not ensure a stable government in France, he warned. Moreover, "though the French economy has improved, it is still very fragile. The shock that would be caused by the implementation of the [leftist] promises would plunge it into a far worse crisis than we have thus far experienced." Finally, in an appeal to his compatriots' traditional distrust of the Germans, Giscard predicted that under leftist rule a weakened France would soon be economically and financially overwhelmed by West Germany. "Who among us could be resigned to that?" he asked solemnly.

The Communists and Socialists characteristically attributed their shortfall not to Giscard, but to one another. Communist Party Boss Georges Marchais claimed that the left's score would have been higher had the Socialists agreed to Communist proposals for updating the left's Common Program, including a sweeping nationalization of industry. Mitterrand offered his own explanation for the poor showing: "The Communist Party, acting in its own partisan interests, had launched an unjust and inopportune polemical attack on the Socialists that broke the dynamism of the union of the left."

Nonetheless. Mitterrand showed no hesitation in making key concessions to the Communists, in the hope of salvaging a second-round victory. Marchais immediately moved to exploit the Socialists' weakness, exacting from Mitterrand a promise to allocate ministerial posts in proportion to the votes polled by each leftist party. In the event of a leftist victory, this would give the Communists half of the Cabinet seats. Mitterrand even agreed to consider Communists for the ministries of Interior, which controls the police. Defense and Foreign Affairs. These were all concessions that he had previously vowed to deny the Communists.

In exchange for Mitterrand's surrender. Marchais agreed to back better-placed Socialist candidates in the second round. Both men calculated that the combined left parties could still pick up a slim majority in the National Assembly, provided Communist voters could be commanded to back Socialist candidates; at the same time, wavering Socialist voters would be persuaded to vote for Communist candidates in districts where they were stronger than the Socialists.

The trouble with Mitterrand's last-ditch agreement was that it might well serve further to frighten an electorate that was already alarmed at the prospect of increased spending, taxes and inflation that a leftist government might bring. Moreover, many previously undecided voters, and moderate Socialists as well, were astonished at the news of Mitterrand's giveaway of ministries to the Communists. MITTERRAND YIELDS TO MARCHAIS'S DIKTAT, headlined the conservative daily Le Figaro. Premier Barre called the leftist accord a "masquerade," a "deception" and a "masterpiece of evasion."

Undaunted, Marchais and Mitterrand doggedly returned to the campaign trail in the week between the two rounds. Almost desperately, they escalated their campaign rhetoric in an effort to overcome the general sense of anticlimax that had settled over the country. "If the right wins." cried Mitterrand, "there is a great risk of creating in France a climate of the kind that precedes the rise of fascism." For his part, Marchais proclaimed that a victory for the government forces would mean that "tomorrow there will be even more daily difficulties and privation, layoffs and unemployment, authoritarianism and degradation in the quality of life " For the left, the crucial question was how well the votes would be transferred from Socialist to Communist candidates. It was generally assumed that in the disciplined Communist electoral corps, 80% could be counted on to obey their leaders' instructions to vote for a front-running Socialist. The heterogeneous and individualistic Socialist Party, however, could not be so reliable. It all depended, said a Socialist mayor, Pierre Mauroy, on whether voters "remembered the past six months [of public feuding] or Monday's agreement."

If the center-right coalition should prevail in the second round. Valery Giscard d'Estaing would emerge with strengthened authority. But he would then face perhaps a more exacting challenge: how to save his country from an economic crisis that is approaching faster than most Frenchmen realize.

Throughout the noisy campaign, none of the center-right candidates dared tell French voters of the true dimensions of their problems. The official unemployment figure (1.04 million, or 4.7% of the work force) hides the fact that some 60,000 jobs are currently being supported artificially, many of them in companies that receive government subsidies to maintain operations. Some analysts estimate that the government has been spending more than $12 billion a year--one-sixth of the national budget--to prop up weak industries.

Thus, even if the center-right wins, the immediate postelection period might produce a small but embarrassing rise in the unemployment rate. Prices, too, are likely to climb; increases in rail, utility and public housing costs are already in the pipeline and threaten to propel inflation past the present rate of 7%. Similarly, France will come under increasing pressure, along with other Western industrial nations, as Third World countries continue to challenge it with their improving industrial strength. Such factors, coupled with disappointment over the left's defeat, might create a wave of strikes or demonstrations by exasperated workers.

On the other hand, if the left should succeed in squeaking through, Giscard would be confronted by an intractable National Assembly, a clutch of Communists in his Cabinet and a hostile Premier--perhaps Francois Mitterrand himself--committed to reversing his most cherished policies. Measuring all the equations, conservative Economist Jean Fourastie recently provided the best summing up. Said he: "It will not be pleasant to hold power in 1978."

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