Socialist with a Lordly View

By John Nielsen

As the election fight begins, Mitterrand remains above the fray

By midnight Sunday, the last of the 2,700 candidates had registered and the race was on that would decide France's immediate political fortunes.

Once again, campaign posters sprouted across the land like wild flowers after a spring rain. At the behest of France's new President, Franc,ois Mitterrand, the country plunged last week into its second election campaign of 1981, a lightning, three-week blitz to elect a new National Assembly, one that Mitterrand fully intends to see reflect his own Socialist image.

The President may well have his way.

His stunning victory last month over former President Valery Giscard d'Estaing appears to have begun a swing to the Socialists. One poll last week gave the Socialists and their allies, the tiny Left Radical Movement, 36% of the vote, up dramatically from the 28% they won on the first presidential ballot. According to most forecasts, the Socialists could double their current total of 117 seats in the 491-member National Assembly when the two rounds of elections--on June 14 and 21 --are completed. Barring a string of disasters at the local level, the Socialists should at least be within easy striking distance of a parliamentary majority of 246 seats.

Ensconced in his office at the Elysee Palace, Mitterrand followed the example of an Olympian predecessor, Charles de Gaulle, and stayed nobly above the battle. He continued to pursue a skillful dual strategy of playing to his left-wing constituency, while reassuring skeptics that he would not go off on a Marxist bender.

Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy announced measures to aid France's less privileged voters. Among them, a 10% increase in the minimum wage and hikes in social security and housing benefits.

"We're off to a good start," declared Labor Leader Edmond Maire, head of the Confederation Franc,aise Democratique du Travail. But the prospect of a Socialist majority in parliament sent many investors running for cover. The Paris Bourse dropped eight points last week, steepening a slide that had decreased overall values 26% since Mitterrand's election on May 10.

Mitterrand's comments on foreign affairs were obviously designed to project a moderate image. In an interview with New York Times Columnist James Reston, the first Mitterrand has given since his election, he enunciated a world view much like Giscard's and, on the subject of East-West relations, delivered opinions not far removed from Ronald Reagan's. Mitterrand condemned the Soviet Union's deployment of medium-range SS-20 missiles and supported the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt. At the same time, Mitterrand outlined policies sure to raise hackles in Washington: French support for a Palestinian state and for the revolutionary movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

To buttress his measured statements, Mitterrand dispatched his Foreign Minister, Claude Cheysson, 61, on a soothing, get-acquainted trip to West Germany and the U.S. Stopping first in Bonn, Cheysson went out of his way to reaffirm the special relationship between France and West Germany, ties anchored in recent years by Giscard's friendship with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Cheysson got an equally warm reception in Washington. Meeting with Reagan, Secretary of State Alexander Haig and other Administration officials, he stressed -- with considerable charm -- that Mitterrand intended to maintain longstanding French policies.

Much of the wariness that had greeted Mitterrand's personal victory at the polls stemmed in part from the Socialists' long, if stormy, association with the pro-Soviet French Communist Party -- and from the possibility of a Communist role in the new government. But as the two parties met last week to discuss working together, the Socialists were decidedly cool to their old comrades, whom they need less today than in the past. At the conclave, Socialist First Secretary Lionel Jospin ticked off the major issues that divide the parties. Unlike the Socialists, the Communists want sweeping nationalization of industry; they support the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and condemn the free-labor movement in Poland.

In the end, the Socialist-Communist talks produced a bland accord, the center piece of which was an agreement to support each other's candidates in the second round of voting. The Socialists were conspicuously silent about granting ministerial posts to Communists in return for the party's support at the polls. Clearly the Communists were at their lowest ebb in over 40 years. The same poll that gave the Socialists 36% of next week's votes forecast that the Communists were likely to poll a mere 14% of the tally -- down from their poor 15.3% score in the presidential elections.

Prospects for Mitterrand's center-right opponents are little better. Since Giscard's defeat, leadership of the fractious opppsition has passed to Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac. Last week Chirac mounted a strident, nonstop campaign. But, according to forecasts, his Rally for the Republic and Giscard's Union for French Democracy will win less than 40% of the vote. In private pep talks to confederates, the mayor insists that "we have a good chance of winning." His argument convinces almost no one -- least of all Franc,ois Mitterrand.

-- By John Nielsen.

Reported by Henry Muller/Paris

With reporting by Henry Muller/Paris

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