France's New Look

By Thomas A. Sancton

Socialist President Mitterrand gets his parliament and a mandate

For the past 34 years, he has celebrated Pentecost Sunday by leading a small group of family and friends on a climb up the Rock of Solutre, a steep and scenic ascent near the medieval Abbey of Cluny in east central France. The locale has a special meaning for him. It was there that his wife's family sheltered members of the Resistance during the German Occupation. After the war, the annual Solutre pilgrimage became a tradition with Franc,ois Mitterrand, an occasion to reunite with relatives and old war friends.

He has made the climb in times of triumph, but more often in long seasons of defeat--as a minister under the Fourth Republic, as an opposition deputy, later as head of the Socialist Party, which seemed unable to take power. So it was no surprise that this year his step seemed to be more jaunty when he headed up the familiar rock in his new role: President of France.

Typically, Mitterrand made no concessions to pomp or protocol. Said his brother-in-law, Actor Roger Hanin, who accompanied the President on the familiar trek: "It was just about the same as it always has been--except that there were more journalists this time." Dressed casually in a sports shirt and a navy-blue cap, brandishing a walking stick, chewing occasionally on a twig, Mitterrand made his way up the steep path with the same air of equanimity, quiet confidence and determination that had marked his 16-year pursuit of the presidency.

There may be Solutres for years to come, but the political ascension of Franeois Mitterrand has peaked: he can go no higher. On Sunday he scored the most smashing triumph of his career as voters gave his Socialist Party a solid majority of some 290 seats in the 491-member National Assembly. At the same time, the Communists, his troublesome allies, lost hope of playing an influential role in the government when they dropped from 86 seats to an estimated 43. For the first time since former President Charles de Gaulle's landslide in 1968, a single party will rule both the executive and legislative branches of government. For Mitterrand, it was not only a stunning personal victory but a green light to govern France on his own terms for half a decade--and possibly longer. No other democratically elected leader in the world can enjoy such a mandate. Noted one jubilant Mitterrand aide: "He will be around for seven years, and he will have parliamentary support for at least five. That's more than President Reagan, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt or Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher can say."

Mitterrand's legislative victory was also a vindication of his long-range political strategy. After winning the presidency last month with a surprise victory over Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the center-right incumbent, Mitterrand disbanded the National Assembly, which had been controlled by Giscard's coalition, an amalgam of the Gaullist and centrist forces that had run the government for 23 years. In the campaign to elect a new Assembly, Mitterrand was threatened from two directions. If the right regained control of the chamber, France could face a constitutional crisis; the institutions of the Fifth Republic are not designed to work if the Elysee and the Assembly are controlled by opposing forces. On the other flank, if the Communists did well, they could force their way into a coalition government and impose their radical demands on the Socialists. Mitterrand's only hope for stable government lay in a Socialist majority or in a strong enough plurality to rule with leftist splinter parties.

The campaign was bitterly fought. On the far left, Communist Boss Georges Marchais trumpeted his party's readiness to "assume all its responsibilities, including in France's government." After seizing control of the center-right forces after Giscard's defeat, Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac enjoined his followers to "keep France from going the road of adventure that the ideologues of the Socialist Party have chosen." Giscard himself confined his activities to a few campaign appearances on behalf of the center-right candidate in his home district of Chamalieres.

Despite the high stakes for him as well as the nation, Franc,ois Mitterrand stayed serenely above the battle, employing the same tactic that had served him so well in the last stages of the presidential race. Embodying the force tranquille of his campaign slogan, he issued only one brief political statement last week, urging voters to "give me the means to apply my program." The new President actually sought to avoid appearing in public or on television. Leaving campaign strategy in the hands of Premier Pierre Mauroy, Mitterrand spent his long workdays huddling with aides over economic reform plans and grappling with his first foreign policy crisis, the destruction two weeks ago of Iraq's French-built nuclear reactor by Israeli jets, an attack that he resoundingly condemned.

Most of Mitterrand's evenings were spent at small, informal Elysee dinners. Gone was the stiff Giscardian protoco that required the President to be served before his guests. Mitterrand's conversation at these gatherings was often far removed from electoral concerns. Recounts Brother-in-Law Hanin: "We talked about Jean Renoir and his films, theater, trees and tennis." Even as the new President was being helicoptered to his own parliamentary district, at Chateau-Chinon, to vote in the first round of the legislative balloting, he appeared utterly oblivious to politics, absorbed in a contemporary Japanese novel.

For all his air of quiet confidence, even Mitterrand must have been surprised by the magnitude of the Socialist sweep, which was apparent as soon as the first-round results began to trickle in on the evening of June 14. Surpassing even the most optimistic polls, Socialist candidates won 37.5% of the popular vote--half again as much as Mitterrand's first-round total on the April 26 presidential ballot. The neo-Gaullists and Giscardians took 20.8% and 19.2% respectively.

Most significantly, the Communists won only 16.2%--just a slight improvement over Marchais's dismal 15.34% in the April 26 presidential voting. Thus Mitterrand, while espousing the unity of the left, finally succeeded where his center-right predecessors had failed, reducing the Communists to a marginal role in French society. On the morning after, Marchais found himself in no position to impose any demands on the Socialist President.

That fact--and the country's deliverance from the threat of a paralyzing constitutional deadlock--eased tensions not only in France but in Western capitals. "Now no one will be able to say Mitterrand is a prisoner of the Communists," said French Political Scientist Pierre Hassner. Nothing underscored the sense of relief as graphically as the reaction of the Paris stock exchange: within days of the first-round voting, values on the Bourse gained back 7% of the 30% lost after Mitterrand's election. The ailing franc, too, was showing signs of stabilizing.

Reflecting a major West German concern, Bonn's General-Anzeiger headlined: COMMUNIST PARTICIPATION UNNECESSARY. Reagan Administration officials privately expressed similar satisfaction. Said one U.S. official: "Mitterrand with a mandate has to be easier to deal with than a Mitterrand constantly forced to protect his left flank."

Defining how Mitterrand won his mandate, and what it really means, was not entirely clear even to the French, who delight in precise analysis. The most likely explanation was that the French, alarmed by rising inflation and unemployment, and tired of Gisc,ard's imperial style, had simply voted for change and thus wound up with Franc,ois Mitterrand in the Elysee. At that point, according to this view, the logical French gave the new President a clear-cut Socialist majority in order to avoid a constitutional deadlock or a messy coalition with the Communists. "Having opted for change, French voters knew enough not to throw the country into a political crisis," explains Alain of Paris' National Foundation of Political Science.

Most non-Socialists remained unconvinced by what, on the surface, might seem to be a plausible enough explanation: that a solid majority of men and women went to the polls four times in two months and chose a Socialist President and parliament because that was what they really wanted. "The people did not vote socialist because they are enthusiastic about nationalizations or Mitterrand's economic program," insists Lancelot. "They voted for Mitterrand because they were fed up with people who acted as if they owned the government."

Indeed, many analysts compared the Socialist victory with the triumph of conservatives in the U.S. and Britain. The common denominator, says Foreign Policy Specialist Simon Serfaty of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is "a rebellion against a perceived ineffectiveness of the government in power." Ralf Dahrendorf, director of the London School of Economics, agrees: "It's not a question of conservatism or socialism being ascendant. It's that people have been voting for change. The French electors might have preferred a different sort of change, but the one they got was the only one available."

To be sure, there were some practical political factors at work in the Socialists' legislative victory. One was Mitterrand's low-key, reassuring performance in office so far. Another was the moderate makeup of his Cabinet, many of whose members in fact came from the same technocratic elite that had staffed the outgoing center-right government. Writes Jacques Fauvet, director of the Paris daily Le Monde: "Without reneging on his promises or on symbolic gestures, Mitterrand has been able to inspire confidence well beyond the Socialist electorate."

Another factor was the disarray within the center-right coalition. The split between Giscard and Chirac was so bitter that the defeated President accused the Paris mayor of committing "premeditated treason" to undermine his reelection. Notes Political Scientist Raymond Aron: "Giscard's defeat did not necessarily entail a route for the center-right. The former majority was not defeated. It committed suicide."

But the deeper causes of the Socialist triumph may lie in a combination of sociological and demographic trends that have been working in the left's favor for over a decade. In the preface to his recent book, Leftist France, Rightist Vote, Political Scientist Lancelot writes that "the social foundations of the left, and notably of the Socialists, have broadened considerably in the past ten years to the detriment of the right's social base." He cites the following trends as increasing the left's support: urbanization, the rising number of salaried workers, growth of the service sector and the steady flow of women into the labor force. Meanwhile, there was a decline in the social groups that traditionally support the right: farmers, small shopkeepers, wealthy bourgeois families and nonworking women.

Paradoxically, the Socialists may also have benefited from the economic prosperity achieved under their center-right predecessors. Not only was France's 12.5% inflation and 7.2% unemployment still comparatively mild, by world standards, but more important, the country has one of Europe's most dynamic and resilient economies. Over the past 13 years, for example, the growth of the gross national product has averaged 4.2%, compared with West Germany's 3.5% and the U.S.'s 2.7%. In the industrialized world, only Japan has a higher rate of investment and savings. Yet the very success of France's state-led capitalist economy has heightened the appeal of state-led socialism. Explains a Paris-based banking analyst: "The Socialist economic program represents one of those periodic redistributions that occur in economies that have been remarkably successful and prosperous. The French people have voiced their approval for a leftist majority precisely because they feel for the first time in memory they can afford it."

Affordable or not, here it comes. Mitterrand did not even wait for his parliamentary majority before acting on some of the key planks of his economic platform. On June 3, the Cabinet announced a 10% raise in the minimum wage, to $3.10 an hour, and expanded allowances of about 25% for the aged, handicapped and poor. Then followed a decree calling for a mandatory fifth week of paid vacation for all salaried workers. On June 10, the government set up a committee of business and union leaders to draft a plan for a gradual shortening of the work week to 35 hours by 1985. Simultaneously came the announcement of nearly 54,000 new government jobs and a reform of the French tax system that would impose surtaxes on company expense accounts and high salaries. And last week the government unveiled a plan to aid small and medium-size businesses with up to $3 billion in low-interest, state-backed loans. At the same time, the state is encouraging the hiring of young and unskilled workers by exempting employers from paying half of their pension contribution.

Some of Mitterrand's more ambitious reforms will require parliamentary approval. He will probably move quickly, for example, on his commitment to create 210,000 new public-sector jobs over the next twelve months. But the new government seems in no hurry to carry out the most controversial part of Mitterrand's economic program: the nationalization of private banks and eleven basic industries, including aircraft production, electronics and chemicals.

No firm date has been set for any nationalizations, and there is a growing feeling that a government takeover may simply involve ministerial supervision of the boards of major companies. Confided a prominent business leader in Paris last week: "I met with Mitterrand ten days ago and I could tell that he simply doesn't know how to nationalize. He's made this campaign pledge and now he's got to fulfill it. But I'm not sure his heart's in it." Other observers, however, are convinced that the full Socialist program--including nationalizations--will be carried out. "Many Frenchmen doubt Mitterrand's socialism and think that since he no longer needs the Communists, he'll behave as a moderate and govern at the center-left," says Raymond Aron. "I think these skeptics are wrong and insult the President." The President himself supported that view last week, vowing publicly to "fulfill all my promises."

Even if they are carried out in full the threatened nationalizations will hardly revolutionize France's economy, which is already heavily state controlled through the government's allocation of investment. After all, Charles de Gaulle started the nationalization process in 1945 leading to state takeovers of Renault and four major banks. Moreover, some of the previously nationalized companies (Renault and Aeospatiale) are doing well.

The most valid criticism of Mitterrand's nationalization plan is that it alienates the business community while assuring no real economic or job-sustaining benefits. With surprising candor, Finance Minister Jacques Delors admits that all the new economic measures will not significantly lower unemployment in the short run and will spur the country's growth rate by only .5% this year.

In the jaundiced eyes of many businessmen, nationalization seems to be part of a general "policy of revenge"--along with the stiff new surtaxes on expense accounts, four-star hotels, private boats and incomes over $65,000. Says one private banker, with considerable hyperbole: "My family and I are going to be virgins sacrificed on the altar of a Socialist god!" Says an embittered business leader: "The Socialist leveler tide just may succeed where 200 years of recurring French puritanism has failed: to make France colorless and downright boring." As for the shorter workday and higher minimum wage, businessmen insist that less work for more pay will simply make French exports uncompetitive, leading to lower growth and higher unemployment.

Boardroom visions of apocalypse seem somewhat exaggerated. The ascendancy of the Socialists is surely no revolution, any more--and probably less--than Reaganism's triumph in the U.S. In many ways, the coming of the new government represents a renewal of some deep-seated French traditions and values. State intervention in economic and social matters, for example, goes as far back as Louis XIV. Even the 35-hour work week coincides with a traditional French preference for leisure over the exclusive pursuit of material wealth. No other nation on earth closes up shop for a month with such flair and goes en masse on vacation the way France does in August.

What the Socialists really promise is not so much a "new economic order" as a shift in priorities: the campaign against unemployment will now take precedence over Giscard's preoccupation with inflation fighting. Meanwhile, the new government has acted capably and responsibly on the monetary front, continuing ex-Premier Raymond Barre's efforts to shore up the sagging franc.

"The French are a hard-working society, very productive and prosperous, and they are going to remain that way, no matter who's in charge and no matter what institutions are imposed," says Edmund Stillman, director of Paris' Hudson Institute. "I'm not saying this is going to be roses from now on. But everything considered, the Socialists here look pretty pragmatic."

The Mitterrand team was also taking a cautious approach to foreign policy during its first weeks in office--and with good reason. The new government faced the task of allaying fears in friendly capitals that abrupt change was in the offing. Shortly after Mitterrand's inauguration last month, Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson set off for Bonn for meetings with West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. His mission: to reassure France's foremost political and economic partner that "close and friendly Franco-German relations would continue" despite the departure of Schmidt's personal friend, cher Valery, from the Elysee. Cheysson next boarded an Air France Concorde for Washington, where he charmed President Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State Alexander Haig with his breezy, gracious manner and his impeccable Oxford English.

There was more than good personal chemistry behind the mutual striving for Franco-American entente. Indeed there was a broad range of foreign policy issues on which the Socialist President's views seemed more compatible with Washington's than those of his patrician predecessor. On East-West questions, for example, both Mitterrand and his Foreign Minister have emphatically denounced the Soviet menace in Afghanistan and Poland. In fact, the Socialists have made it clear to Marchais's Communists that they cannot hope to play even a token role in the government without endorsing that condemnation of Moscow's imperialism.

Mitterrand and Cheysson have also voiced concern over the buildup of Soviet SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe. They have strongly supported NATO's decision to respond by deploying U.S.-made Pershing II and cruise missiles on Western European soil.

Washington is also pleased by Mitterrand's deep personal sympathy for Israel and by his early support for the Camp David agreement, which his predecessor had criticized. One of Mitterrand's first foreign policy gestures after his election, in fact, was to accept Prime Minister Menachem Begin's invitation to visit Israel "when circumstances allow." At the same time the French President supports the establishment of a Palestinian homeland and feels that his evenhanded approach to the Middle East will give France more leverage in the search for a peaceful settlement. As Mitterrand put it in an interview with the New York Times: "I am a friend of Israel, and I shall do nothing to endanger Israel's existence nor the means to exist; but I do not think that it is realistic to pretend that the Palestinian problem does not exist."

The new administration's sympathy for Israel was sorely tested two weeks ago when Begin sent his F-16s to destroy a French-built reactor near Baghdad. Not only did Mitterrand and Cheysson publicly denounce the attack, but France last week introduced a resolution in the U.N. Security Council censuring Israel and calling on the country to repay Iraq for the damage done to the $260 million facility. (France later supported a milder resolution, worked out by the U.S. and Iraq, that only implied Israel should pay for the damage.) Despite his anger over Begin's action, Mitterrand is unlikely to waver in his support for the Israeli nation.

In the Third World, the outlook for U.S.-French cooperation is not so bright. Mitterrand rejects the Reagan Administration's rigid East-West approach to Third World problems: developing countries that like the Soviet Union are bad, those that like the U.S. are good. Says Michael Harrison of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies: "France will not fall into the bipolar world of Washington today." Mitterrand instead tends to view the Third World in so-called North-South terms, stressing the need to redress the inequalities between industrialized powers and undeveloped nations. Failure to do so, he says, "will be one of the causes of the most serious tragedies at the end of the century, to be explicit, of world war."

A second major difference with the Reagan Administration is that Mitterrand is a strong advocate of applying human rights criteria in dealing with evolving countries. The French President has talked, for example, of cutting off arms sales to authoritarian states, regardless of their anti-Communist credentials. He has sided with the Third World against South Africa's apartheid regime at a time when the Reagan Administration is seeking a "constructive" working relationship with Pretoria. He has criticized U.S. policy toward El Salvador and Nicaragua, expressing open sympathy for leftist liberation movements.

Nor could Washington have drawn any comfort from Mitterrand's appointment of Regis Debray, a onetime supporter of Fidel Castro's revolutionary ambitions in Latin America, as foreign policy adviser. By tacit agreement, these prickly issues were sidestepped in the initial discussions between the Reagan and Mitterrand governments; they are likely to cause future frictions.

But it is in the arena of French domestic politics that Franc,ois Mitterrand's immediate battles must be fought. He enters the fray armed with a formidable power to work his will--which raises the crucial questions of what that will is and how wisely the new President may pursue it. After seven weeks in office, his vagueness on many points veils the future in uncertainty. "We have given a blank check to a man who has always specialized in doublespeak," says Philosopher Jean-Marie Benoist. Warns Philippe Tesson, editor of the independent Quotidien de Paris: "The temptation of abuse is born of holding all the power. The Socialists reproached their adversaries for that sufficiently that we may remind them of it today."

Other experts, however, argue that the very magnitude of the Socialists' power will make them more cautious and responsible. Predicts Political Scientist Lancelot: "Instead of having to negotiate compromises that would have blurred responsibilities, the Socialists will be able to take full credit--or blame--for whatever they decide."

A top Mitterrand aide points to the assured longevity of the Socialist majority as guarantee of its judicious leadership. Says he: "It gives the President time to implement his reform at the pace that he chooses. Mitterrand will fulfill all of the commitments he made, but he will do so in a reasonable manner, after having prepared his measures properly and without having to negotiate with other parties."

Perhaps. But it is also possible that in time Mitterrand's large majority will start pulling apart at its ideological seams. On the Socialist far left lies the Marxist group known acronymically as CERES, which is led by Research Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement and Industry Minister Pierre Joxe. This is the faction responsible for the smattering of knee-jerk class struggle and anticapitalist rhetoric that found its way into the official Socialist platform. At the other extreme are Premier Mauroy, Delors and Planning and Regional Development Minister Michel Rocard,--all moderate Social Democrats. In the middle is Mitterrand, whose outstanding skill through all the years of opposition has been his ability to reconcile these different currents. The Socialists will stay in power, of course, squabble as they may, but their differences will weaken Mitterrand--if he allows them to get out of hand.

Another question mark hanging over the new government's future is the ultimate role of the Communists. Despite their parliamentary weakness, they still control the nation's largest trade union, the General Confederation of Labor (C.G.T.). Some of Mitterrand's supporters argue that his overwhelming victory gives him the freedom to name a few Communist ministers without appearing to be beholden to them. According to this theory, giving the Communists one or two minor ministries would guarantee labor peace and make it awkward for them to criticize Mitterrand's policies.

The opposing argument is that such a move would inevitably be misinterpreted abroad, to France's detriment. Most worrisome are the reactions of the U.S., West Germany and staunchly anti-Communist Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, which provides one-third of France's oil imports and is a major customer for French arms. King Khalid, in fact, is reported to have expressed concern over a possible Communist Cabinet role, while lunching at the Elysee two weeks ago. Aides to Helmut Schmidt hint that the Chancellor will drive the same message home to Mitterrand when the two meet in Luxembourg this week. In spite of such pressures, some Mitterrand-watchers predict that he will bring a few Communists into the government, if only to satisfy his longstanding ambition to "unify France's left."

Whether he does so or not, there is little doubt that Franc,ois Mitterrand will be the real power in France until at least 1986. It is on the basis of his own acts, and not his ideology, that he will be judged. Addressing a word of advice to Americans, L.S.E.'s Dahrendorf cautions: "Don't think that because it is a Socialist government, it must pursue policies unacceptable to the U.S. Hold off and see what they do in practice. If you do that, you may end up finding Mitterrand's France easy to live with." And so might the French people who elected him. --By Thomas A. Sancton. Reported by William Blaylock and Henry Muller/Paris

With reporting by William Blaylock, Henry Muller/Paris

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