Spectator's Journal / A Farewell to Bras
Kaplan, Roger
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL A FAREWELL TO BRAS by Roger Kaplan May 30, 1981-May is a history-charged month in France. General De Gaulle returned to power in May 1958, saving France some say: establishing...
...Under the conditions that prevailed after the first round of voting, the Socialists could claim with some credibility a vision of a left-wing future without Communists...
...President Mitterrand is said to be contemplating changes chiefly in the domestic, not the foreign policy, programs of his predecessor...
...The Gaullists, with the exception of a few personal endorsements, including RPR leader Jacques Chirac's very lukewarm one, did not rally to him and demobilized their electoral machine after the first round...
...In May-June 1978 the Union of the Left, rent by internal disputes about the direction of history, failed to capture the government in parliamentary elections, despite several years of steady gains...
...It depends on how you feel...
...It contains no Communists and has representatives of every faction in the Socialist party...
...Mitterrand has dissolved the National Assembly and is going into the June legislative elections which will replace it with a politically masterful government designed to reassure the voters...
...A Socialist foreign policy, however, may carry some surprise for the United States too...
...There is a very good chance the Socialists will emerge from the legislative elections strong enough to govern alone...
...The collapse of Moscow's man in France is probably the most significant political development in the election, even if for the moment it is overshadowed, on the Right, by the bitterness of defeat...
...And we can also reflect that every so often the French need to get their revolutionary ardor out of their system...
...but if there is any time to test Socialist disorder in France-and every people must be allowed its fling with infantilism-it is surely now, when the PCF is least able to cause a lot of mischief...
...To be sure, a government that includes a "Minister for Free Time" must have novel ideas on the role of the state in people's lives...
...or plotting ways of getting money out of the country, of "saving what is essential" in the Tune elections...
...After Chirac's brilliant show had revealed Giscard's unpopularity among the conservative electorate this blunted the Giscardi-ens' only remaining card-the fear of revolution...
...Indeed a number of Gaullist leaders, including Marie-France Garaud and Colonel Passy, De Gaulle's wartime intelligence chief, tailed for a Mitterrand vote, and it is clear that a great many of their followers answered by doing just that...
...It was reasonable to predict, as virtually everyone did, that Giscard d'Estaing would squeak through as in 1974...
...Indeed, Giscard announced: It will be Communist order or Socialist disorder, if I lose...
...Until the legislative elections, the stock exchange and the money markets will remain the only sure indicators of what is going on...
...General De Gaulle returned to power in May 1958, saving France some say: establishing the Fifth Republic at any rate (actually approved by national referendum the following September...
...So we are between elections in France and we can only gossip...
...He has also gone on record as supporting the PLO's claim to represent the Palestinian people, so he may not be quite as much help in the Middle East as some commentators have suggested...
...But the event that really tipped it for the Socialist candidate was the disastrous showing of the Communist Georges Marchais...
...The weak spot in the argument, as I pointed out in these pages in April, was that Giscard was unpopular, that the Gaullist votes might not go to him as surely as the Communists' would go to Mitterrand, and that certain issues-notably his handling of foreign policy-had been brought up, in which he looked only marginally better-and as it turned out, in some cases worse-than Francois Mitterrand...
...Ten years later the Fifth Republic tottered under a hail of Left Bank cobblestones, until the General got on television and told everybody to quiet down and get back to work...
...dancing in the streets of the Latin Quarter every night since the emotional demonstration at the Place de Bastille and Mitterrand's moving visit to the Pantheon...
...So now is the time of gossip and guessing, waiting and hoping...
...His appointment of the famous humanitarian Regis Debray as his chief adviser on Latin America suggests we shall not be getting much political help from France in our hemisphere...
...This May the Left, in the person of Francois Mitterrand, won the presidency of the Republic...
...The historic tendency of the French, after all, is to complain all the time and then keep the conservatives in power...
...He may turn out to have been right...
...Who knows, this may yet turn out to have been a pretty tame way to do it...
...True, Mitterrand has always been a friend of Israel...
...in May 1958 De Gaulle was legally made head of the last government of the Fourth Republic...
...It was known that he was in trouble, but no one expected the Communists to fall (at 15 percent) below the point they first achieved in 1936 at the time of the Popular Front...
...Well, Giscard d'Estaing was unable to surmount these problems...
Vol. 14 • July 1981 • No. 7
