France Down to a Fighting Finish

By Frederick Painton

As television lights glared, the survivors of the first round of France's presidential election faced each other last week in a 2-hr. 20-min. debate watched by some 30 million citizens. Billed as the high point of the electoral campaign, the duel between Socialist President Francois Mitterrand and Neo- Gaullist Premier Jacques Chirac produced no clear-cut winner. The dislike was almost palpable, however, between the two men who had been cohabiting, in French parlance, as government leaders for the past two years. During an exchange in which each candidate attempted to suggest that the other was soft on terrorism, Mitterrand flared up at Chirac, "This is not fury on my part, this is indignation." After the President charged the Premier with engineering the release of a proven terrorist in a deal with Tehran, Chirac angrily demanded that Mitterrand "look me in the eye" and repeat his allegations.

If Chirac appeared the more aggressive of the rivals, it was because he badly needed to win the debate. Mitterrand could settle for a draw. In the first round of presidential balloting on April 24, he emerged with 34% of the vote, putting him, as expected, far ahead of Chirac, who won 19.9%. That made the incumbent the odds-on favorite in the May 8 second-round runoff.

The surprise, however, was the muscular showing of Jean-Marie Le Pen, candidate of the ultra-rightist, anti-immigrant National Front. With 14.5% of the vote, Le Pen finished just behind former Premier Raymond Barre, with 16.5%, but well ahead of the once mighty Communist Party, whose candidate, Andre Lajoinie, won just 6.8% in the first round. In the process, Le Pen's movement seemed to have replaced the Communists as the major vehicle for protest voters. Le Pen thus became a durable force and pivotal arbiter of France's now divided right.

For most French citizens, Le Pen's triumph was cause for a certain amount of embarrassment and concern. Said Rumanian-born French Playwright Eugene Ionesco: "It is unacceptable and shameful for a country like France and for people like the French. Enough is enough."

Le Pen, campaigning on the promise to expel France's roughly 4 million immigrants and reimpose the death penalty, had undeniable grass-roots appeal, but his support had been expected to reach no higher than 11%. Instead it mushroomed across the country, reaching more than 20% in eight metropolitan departments. The burly ex-paratrooper grabbed 28.3% of the vote in Marseilles, France's second largest city, topping all other major candidates. A total of some 4.4 million citizens supported the ultra-rightist. As the dimensions of Le Pen's breakthrough became apparent, the National Front leader declared on television, "We have the certainty of a political earthquake and a radical transformation of the national landscape. Nothing ever will be done in France without the voters of the National Front."

Le Pen's last-minute surge of support, according to political strategists on the right, may have been been helped by the ongoing outburst of secessionist violence in France's South Pacific territory of New Caledonia. That crisis exploded on French TV screens only 24 hours before the presidential balloting, when four French policemen were hacked to death with machetes and 27 others taken hostage by Melanesian separatists. According to a veteran campaign consultant, Bernard Rideau, as many as 750,000 voters may have migrated into Le Pen's camp because they felt Premier Chirac had failed to react harshly enough to the attack. Speculated Rideau: "Voters said, 'Chirac only talks tough.' "

Both Le Pen and ex-Premier Barre, a centrist backed by the center-right Union pour la Democratie Francaise (U.D.F.), have now been eliminated from the May 8 presidential runoff. With only days to go before the final round, opinion polls gave 53% of the vote to Mitterrand and 47% to Chirac. Sensing a moody electorate, the ever circumspect Mitterrand was cautious about the eventual outcome. Said he: "I would not be annoyed with just 51%."

The chief victim of the National Front's electoral success appeared to be Chirac, whose first-round total was a full 2.5 points lower than anticipated. As the only remaining candidate of the right, Chirac needs Le Pen votes in the runoff to come close to winning. National Front strategists insist, however, that unless the Premier makes an explicit deal with their movement, he will not receive its support. The trouble is that any kind of open deal Chirac might make with the extremist Le Pen would backfire by alienating more moderate Barre supporters, whose votes could also prove to be essential.

Barre's support appeared to be at least provisionally guaranteed. Less than an hour after the voting results came in, the defeated politician instructed his supporters to vote for the Premier. But Barre pointedly reaffirmed his loathing of every sort of "xenophobia" and "racism" -- in effect warning Chirac against any bargain with Le Pen. Despite his reservations about Chirac's campaign tactics in the first round, Barre made a dramatic joint appearance with him at a huge rally late last week on the outskirts of Paris.

Chirac's disappointing first-round tally has undermined his authority as leader of the conservative coalition that has controlled France's National Assembly since 1986. The result also undercut his standing as the chief figure of France's conventional right. In the weeks prior to the balloting, Chirac's Rassemblement pour la Republique failed in some heavy-handed attempts to lure smaller coalition parties, including Barre's U.D.F., into an eventual, single right-wing organization led by the Premier. If Chirac loses badly in the runoff, he will undoubtedly risk defections from his government by rightist allies who are already planning new ways to survive in the altered political scene.

Mitterrand's first-round voter tally fell short of what opinion polls had predicted. His low-key, moderate campaign calling for the reconciliation of all his countrymen was apparently too ecumenical a pitch for the taste of militants, who voted instead for left-wing splinter-party candidates and Les Verts, an ecology movement.

As the second-round duel with Chirac got under way, Mitterrand's task was still daunting. He had to push Chirac as far toward Le Pen as possible in the hope that many of Barre's 5 million center-right supporters would turn to the Socialist but moderate-sounding President. The pollsters carefully spelled out the arithmetic of Mitterrand's task. From the environmentalist, Communist and fringe Marxist parties, they calculated, Mitterrand could expect to add 13.5 percentage points to his first-round score. Total: 47.5%.

The professionals estimated that the President could also count on 3 percentage points from Le Pen's first-round total. That support, they thought, would come mainly from disenchanted Communists in working-class districts, where Le Pen sentiment was often strongest. Such voters had cast anti- immigrant protest ballots in the first round, but were expected to return to the leftist fold in the runoff. An additional 2 points of support was expected from Barre voters. All that would push Mitterrand over the top with nearly 53%.

For Chirac, the arithmetic was more problematical. In addition to his 19.9%, the experts reckoned he could count on 11.5 percentage points from Le Pen's voters and 15 from the Barre camp. That would still leave him short, at 46.4%.

Badly handicapped as his candidacy appeared to be, Chirac simply could not be counted out. After Barre's public endorsement, former President Valery Giscard d'Estaing offered Chirac his support. In a television address, Giscard asked his followers to vote for Chirac because "we cannot pay the price of changing policy every two years, and . . . vote every six months." One of Chirac's attractions remains his past two years in office. The Premier already has a majority in the 577-seat National Assembly that he can use to govern if elected. On the other hand, Mitterrand, if re-elected, would have to fashion his own parliamentary majority.

After digesting the first-round results, Chirac threw himself into a frenetic three-stop-a-day campaign across France. In six days, the Premier and his entourage were planning to hit 18 cities, eleven more than he had intended to blitz before the first-round tallies appeared. Somehow the hyperkinetic candidate was also managing to run the government and deal with the crisis in New Caledonia.

On his barnstorming dash, Chirac will seek to appeal to both the center- right and Le Pen voters. The Premier flatly ruled out any deals with the National Front, but he said he would address "the worries" of extreme-right voters. Chirac mentioned "all those who want security and to be assured that delinquency, criminality and terrorism will be fought with the necessary firmness; that our national identity will be preserved; that clandestine immigration will be fought."

The law-and-order issue that Le Pen has so successfully exploited cropped up repeatedly during the Mitterrand-Chirac TV debate. The rivals also paid attention to the National Front's main theme of immigration. Neither criticized Le Pen, and both men -- in different ways -- agreed on the need to stem further increases in immigration. At the same time, each accused the other of "winking" at National Front voters. Bruno Megret, Le Pen's campaign manager, had it right when he noted that his candidate "was present in the mind of each of the two candidates." That ominous presence threatens to disturb the patterns of French political life for some time to come.

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante/Paris and Adam Zagorin/St. Cloud