MITTERRAND'S VICTORY: POLITICS OF THE LEFT
Bloch-Michel, Jean
Why did Francois Mitterrand, after winning an absolute majority in the Assembly, take Communists into his government, thereby risking difficulties with foreign leaders and possibly causing...
...Before the first round, and even between the first and second rounds, when defeat seemed increasingly certain and clear-cut, the men of the right went on countering the social democratic project with the same arguments and scare campaigns...
...And since the difficulties came from abroad, it would have been useless and even disastrous to make any change whatsoever in the domestic policy, which was based on the soundest economic principles...
...Day-to-day management surely has its points, but it's not enough...
...When the Communists broke away in 1977 it was so obviously of their own doing that the voters held it against them rather than against the SP...
...Mitterrand's first job was rebuilding the party...
...This is why Mitterrand won...
...For a long time, the Communists have been accusing Mitterrand of trying to use them as a reserve, so to speak, and have been quoting what he had said on the subject at the Socialist International meeting—in 1972 if I am correct—about wanting to bring the French CP down to 15 percent...
...The chief factor is what I just mentioned about the center-left's inability to govern...
...Giscard did his very best at the beginning...
...Concealed behind these two goals of uniting the left and cutting the CP down to an acceptable size, there is something else...
...These 6 million Communist voters were very convenient for the right...
...The strategy of uniting the left is based on two facts...
...It's probably the SP's new pragmatic socialism that enabled it to put a stop to its continuing ideological squabbling with the CP...
...In 1970 and the following years, the CP represented about 6 million voters...
...But what brought this about...
...The French people saw through it: this was the type of relationship the lord of the manor maintained with his tenant farmers, or the aristocrat (real or fake) had with his retinue...
...Uniting the left hinged, of course, on the formation of a strong Socialist party...
...Chaban Delmas's timid attempt to create a "new society" was stopped by President Georges Pompidou...
...By eliminating this buffer, by placing the public in direct contact with this professor, a total stranger to the daily life of the nation's men and women, who made decisions about their lives in the name of principles he explained to them with the undisguised contempt of the expert for the layman, Giscard d'Estaing probably made one of the gravest blunders of his career...
...This lack of a project suddenly pointed up the intellectual paucity of the right, in contrast to the projects of the left...
...But, as Sartre Paris used to say, if one can't govern with the Communists, neither can one govern without them...
...On Afghanistan, Poland, the Camp David accords, the SS-20s, but also on the timing and scope of the nationalizations, the international crisis, and decentralization...
...It is a program of very gradual reforms that takes into account the national and troubled international picture, and the need tc maintain the fundamental balances...
...Once this was achieved, additional factors also tended to support the policy...
...To plan is our strongest imperative," de Gaulle used to say...
...It has never been made clear enough that, under the debonaire appearance of a teacher's son who has made good, Pompidou was a man of the right...
...there also are two others...
...At that time the Socialist party, eroded by its internal rifts and compromises, no longer was a group capable of winning, although it had remained quite firmly entrenched in the local city halls and general councils...
...The other mistakes of Giscard and his followers stem from the way they chose to govern...
...That's a perfect text you're proposing to us," Marchais is reported to have told Jospin during the negotiations...
...The Premier has to be a politician...
...This latter goal is what has been called altering the balance within the left...
...They are still in a state of shock...
...Was the SP going to go on as if they didn't exist...
...This policy is to unite the left, and it also aims at bringing the influence of the Communist party back to what should be its normal level in a nation such as France...
...When this was pointed out to him at the time of the common program negotiations, he answered that what the CP "thought," as opposed to what it "did," was not his concern...
...Let us also note that it's this essentially social democratic program that the Communists have accepted in order to enter the government —entei "through the back door," as the Rome Republics put it...
...no more than Mitterand, for that matter...
...It was quite a chance he was taking and up to now he has done all right...
...The Socialists were smart enough to realize that among the people of the left a strong drive for unity was rising...
...And what a defeat...
...It had initially taken shape when Mitterrand ran against de Gaulle as the left's sole candidate, and a second time and in the same manner in 1974...
...enter "on their knees," as the Paris Canarc Enchaini wrote...
...After a few reforms—important ones to be sure, but that didn't change anything in the structure of society or the economy—the right used power as was to be expected...
...In the 23 years they held power, the men of the right had come to regard themselves as the legitimate rulers...
...When he proposed a union of the left in 1971, and in 1972 succeeded in getting the Communists to sign the common program, he appeared to stand for unity and the Socialist party along with him...
...Since the Communists were on bad terms with the Socialists they were not dangerous, and the right believed till 409 the last moment that it could continue using them as a bugaboo...
...Beware," we were told, "our opponents are trying to drag you into a collectivist society that 410 will destroy your freedoms," and so forth...
...Without any project, what could the right do...
...Since the way the country was managed was not to be questioned, all the difficulties were ascribed to developments abroad—the petroleum upheavals, the German or the American recession, and so on...
...In Mitterrand's view, a government of the left is therefore bound to "drift to the right" if it separates itself from the Communists...
...As Maurice Duverger recently wrote in Le Monde, the Socialists won when the left united, and made additional gains when it broke up...
...There is no doubt that this is a tactical position...
...After Mitterrand was elected, the campaign for the legislative elections started...
...He must be the one who must try, for political reasons, to have the sacrifices requested by his Minister of the Economy and accepted by the public...
...But signing such a contract was something else again...
...And while these men in power proclaimed their partisanship for a society dedicated to "freedom and responsibility," few of their cabinets did more, through demagogy and in order to flatter what they thought was the predominant public opinion, than to curtail that freedom and responsibility...
...Whatever one may think of him as a person, or of some aspects of his policy, all the people of the left should thank him for having done it...
...Francois Mitterrand has no illusions on this score...
...It seems to me that one of Giscard d'Estaing's worst mistakes was choosing an economist for Premier —"the best French economist," he said at the time...
...His departure has been compared to that of Charles X when, as Chateaubriand wrote, the people went to the windows to see the monarchy ride away...
...The government was a manager— manager of the nation, crisis manager...
...Given the situation, it was hard to believe he could...
...This lack of a project—or shall we say, of a general idea of the society's future—resulted in a series of contradictions that the government was not even aware of...
...But it was an understandable one, since he had never grasped the significance of contact between the citizenry and power...
...The CI was faced with a hard choice...
...This reminded me of my trips to Portugal in Salazar's times, when the escudo was one of the strongest currencies in Europe and one of the most valued, while the country was dying of hunger...
...Whatever the CP does now, and even if it makes some gains among the voters, which is not inconceivable, the Constitution of the Fifth Republic that Mitterrand so actively fought is giving the Socialist President a seven-year term to win or to lose, and five years to the just-elected Chamber...
...Why did Francois Mitterrand, after winning an absolute majority in the Assembly, take Communists into his government, thereby risking difficulties with foreign leaders and possibly causing some second thoughts among his center-left constituency...
...Guy Mollet, bogged down in the Algerian war, gradually abandoned all the tenets of the left while retaining its rhetoric...
...I HAVE USED the term "social democratic" and would like to conclude with this comment on it...
...It probably could have been signed by Brandt, and certainly by Kreisky...
...It also was the CP's acknowledgment that it had become a fringe party, was giving up any Communist "project" and so, to put it succinctly, the CP was committing itself to a social democratic policy, although a few weeks earlier the term was still used as an insult...
...To them, the victory of the left was not a defeat so much as an usurpation...
...By using a pragmatic approach and not worrying about the doctrinal issue, Mitterrand and his friends worked out their strategy for uniting the left...
...When in 1971, at the Epinay congress, Mitterrand got hold of the SP and led his friends into the party, when later Michel Rocard's friends also joined, together with the Marxists of the old SFIO (Section Francaise de 'Internationale Ouvriere) fresh groups of socialists of all types came in...
...It does not provide for free medical care or the same scope of nationalizations...
...With a great deal of courage, stubbornness, and skill, Mitterrand made the SP into the political force it is today...
...Mendes France was thrown out by the right and by his own friends in the Radical party after he had finished with the Vietnamese problem...
...THESE ARE SOME of the reasons why the Socialists won, and we can pause now to give some thought to those who are leaving power...
...Brezhnev had...
...The franc is strong," we were told daily...
...The French right, however, was so utterly incapable of coming up with a "project," a "model for society," that its government discarded planning altogether...
...Not at all...
...Many of them were ardent Catholic activists but none of them Marxists...
...The squabbling had been a source of great satisfaction to the CP, which felt that if the two parties remained at odds it had nothing to fear...
...The program put forth by Mitterrand is less socialist than were some Labour programs in England...
...One would have thought that the right had understood why it had failed and would have changed its methods...
...Giscard d'Estaing wasn't beaten, he was chased out (and in part by his former friends...
...It is odd that these economists, these managers, did not realize that in today's world, management has to be based on a project, a "model," as the new science of management calls it...
...they can't get over it...
...The nation was under the impression that its government regarded the steady rise in unemployment as an unpleasant phenomenon, but one over which it had no more control than over the weather...
...One should not forget that for the CP signing the government program meant a 180° turn on every point...
...Its percentage of voters was down to 16 and was doomed to fall even further if it pursued the same antisocialist policy that had prompted it to wish for the victory of the right, as Mr...
...His problem," de Gaulle said, "is the people...
...It is to tame the CP, to "social democratize" it, as it were, to stop it from being a constant source of political unrest and social imbalance...
...The fact is that, whatever one may think of his action, it is quite consistent and reflects a policy defined almost 20 years ago...
...The entire presidential campaign focused on scare mongering...
...The result was the series of wrong gestures and the many ridiculous initiatives people remember— breakfast invitations to the neighborhood sanitation men, or meals taken in the homes of deserving families...
...The only thing that's missing is the SP enrollment blank for us to fill out...
...It could scare people, or so it believed...
...First, since the early days of the French Republic, the center-left failed in all its attempts to govern, be it with Mendes France, Guy Mollet or, in a slightly different context, with Chaban Delmas...
...The running of the treasury and the finances topped all other concerns...
...And his advisers were a small group even further to the right— Jacques Chirac and the two gray eminences, Pierre Juillet and Marie France Garaud...
...Unlike the governments of the Fourth Republic, which were at the mercy of a ministerial crisis, the current government has time on its side...
...it is not as radical...
...Translated by HELEN KATEL 411...
...The CP has certainly not renounced its "project" forever in order to switch to social democratic ways...
...The only effective political way of opposing a project is to present a counterproject...
Vol. 28 • September 1981 • No. 4
