Spoilsport from the Left

By Marguerite Johnson

In a perverse replay of 1978, Marchais undercuts Mitterrand

It was the biggest Communist Party rally of the French presidential election campaign. Thousands of students and workers marched across Paris to the historic Place de la Bastille. Many carried banners with familiar bread-and-butter Slogans: WE WANT HOUSING AND JOBS and PRODUCE FRENCH. Caravans of buses filled with activists poured in from the provinces. With rope and tackle, a mountain climber managed to hoist a red flag to the summit of the square's monumental central column, where it fluttered from the arms of a winged figure. Finally the party's pugnacious leader, Presidential Candidate Georges Marchais, rose to address the cheering throng of 70,000.

Marchais, 60, an aggressive, hard-lining former metalworker who has been party boss for the past eight years, seized the occasion to launch some characteristically hard-bitten attacks on the leading candidates. French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, he proclaimed, was "the champion of the insolent and decadent aristocracy that dominates France." He reminded his audience that "the people rose up and assaulted the Bastille" in 1789, sweeping away "the old rotten regime." Then he turned with equal antagonism on the other main candidate, Socialist Leader Franc,ois Mitterrand. Heaping scorn on his former partner in the now defunct coalition of leftist parties, Marchais disparaged Mitterrand's socialist and working-class credentials. "He passes his time soliciting the confidence of the business community," said Marchais. He went on to urge his troops to turn out in record numbers at the ballot box. By doing so, he clearly implied, they would help prevent the Socialist from winning.

Marchais's speech was characteristic of the perverse, often perplexing performance that has made him the spoiler of the campaign. That role has taken on a bizarre urgency as the two-round election draws close. Polls indicate that in the first round, April 26, Mitterrand should handily defeat both Marchais and the fourth challenger, Gaullist Leader Jacques Chirac, and run a close second to Giscard.

In that event Giscard and Mitterrand would face each other in a May 10 runoff, and Marchais's Communists could be instrumental in swinging the outcome either way.

Marchais bills himself as the "anti-Giscard candidate," but the non-Communist French press routinely describes his speeches as "doubletalk." One prominent Socialist leader goes so far as to call him a "Janus, who has two faces: one the anti-Giscard candidate, the other turned against Franc,ois Mitterrand." Pundits insist that Marchais actually has a carefully masked preference for the re-election of the conservative Giscard over the leftist Mitterrand. His main reason, they reckon: the fear that a Socialist victory would severely undercut the influence of the smaller Communist Party and relegate it to a helpless neither-government-nor-opposition ambiguity.

Marchais, in fact, seems to go out of his way to frighten middle-of-the-road voters out of supporting Mitterrand. One of his latest ploys, incredibly enough, has been to raise the specter of Communist ministers in a Mitterrand government. Mitterrand has been forced to insist that he would never accept them--and in so doing has given Marchais an excuse, should he choose, to ask his membership to boycott the second round rather than vote for Mitterrand.

Playing the role of the spoiler, however, could backfire. Some polls give Marchais a mere 15% of the presidential vote--a huge comedown from the 20% the Communists achieved in 1978. If Marchais's showing proved to be that poor, the chances are that his leadership of the party would be challenged soon after the election. As it is, Marchais's support inside the party is hardly unanimous. Members of the rank and file are unhappy with his strict, sometimes overbearing control of party machinery. Many intellectuals have bolted over his obdurate refusal to allow internal debate or criticize the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The Communist tactics are strikingly reminiscent of the 1978 Assembly campaign, when Marchais deliberately sabotaged the left's chances of coming to power. The Communist-Socialist alliance of the time, called the Union of the Left, had been running ahead of the Giscard government in every poll when the Communists suddenly torpedoed its chances.

Marchais lashed out with a number of statements that served to frighten voters--and thus ensured the victory of Giscard's coalition. One theory was that Moscow may have had a hand in the French Communists' caprices, perhaps because it feared a leftist victory might shake up East-West relations. In addition, Moscow was believed to have grown comfortable with a succession of conservative Fifth Republic governments, dating back to Charles de Gaulle's return to power in 1958. Some analysts believe that Moscow may be exercising a certain amount of remote control once again.

Certainly, Marchais's current campaign has been as paradoxical as his 1978 performance. His 131-point economic program is predictably radical, calling for the nationalization of 23 major companies and confiscation of all individual earnings of more than $100,000 a year. But his most controversial tactic is one that might have been expected from the far right rather than the left: the deliberate fanning of racist sentiments against African immigrant workers.

The issue came to a head in December, when Communist city officials of the Paris suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine launched a Christmas Eve attack on a housing complex where some 300 immigrant workers from Mali had just been installed. The Communists shouted threats and insults, severed electrical, telephone, water and heating lines, and rammed the building with a bulldozer. In sanctioning the outrage afterward, Marchais declared, "We do not want a new Harlem or a new Soweto in the Paris suburbs." By so nakedly exploiting the immigrant issue, Marchais obviously hoped to increase the Communist vote among lower-class suburbanites. But other leftists put a balder tag on the Communist tactics: "Red fascism." --By Marguerite Johnson.

Reported by Sandra Burton/Paris

With reporting by Sandra Burton/Paris

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