The Mitterrand transition
Judt, Tony
The French Fifth Republic is thirty years old. Its founder and first president, Charles de Gaulle, designed its constitution to achieve two overriding goals: to secure political stability by...
...For the second time in a decade, the party has won both presidential and assembly elections, and is on its way to becoming the natural party of government in France...
...It was only able to elect one candidate to the assembly, a victim of declining support and an electoral system that massively disadvantages small or extremist parties...
...Between a left intent on denying its inheritance and a right divided between pygmies and bigots, many electors turned their backs on the whole affair...
...His share of the vote in the first round on April 24 was 38 percent, respectable but nowhere near enough to ensure outright victory...
...But from the start the real prize was not policy-making but control of the presidency at the expiration of Mitterrand's mandate...
...Mitterrand ran and won...
...This was correctly taken to symbolize a shift from "doctrinal" to "pragmatic" Socialist policies and the four Communist ministers duly resigned...
...The one thing Mitterrand has so far failed to 400 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions do is give a new direction to his movement, which has abandoned marxism and the myth of the grand soir, but has yet to replace them with anything much beyond good intentions and the rhetoric of social justice...
...Using the momentum of his surprise victory, Mitterrand dissolved parliament, and in the ensuing elections his Socialist party won a majority of the seats in the National Assembly...
...The Communists, on the other hand, did better than their presidential candidate Andre Lajoinie had managed...
...The second round was a foregone conclusion, despite desperate measures by Chirac, the candidate of the right and still the prime minister, including a hostages-for-arms deal with Iran and a shoot-out with Kanak separatists in the South Pacific...
...But in 1981 Francois Mitterrand, the candidate of the Socialist left, was narrowly elected to the presidency, defeating the incumbent Valery Giscard d'Estaing...
...It will fall upon others, perhaps starting with Michel Rocard himself, to work out what they wish to do with their new-found strength...
...No one yet knows what the new Rocard government will achieve, nor even what it wants to attempt...
...The official Communist candidate got just under 11 percent of the vote, while the two conservative candidates, Chirac and the former prime minister Raymond Barre, got less than 34 percent between them...
...Le Pen still has hopes for next year's local elections, however, and he has a small but real chance of being elected mayor of Marseilles...
...But some things are clear...
...With the Communists (27 seats) and their allies on the left-center, they can muster 302 votes...
...The Socialists have 262 seats in an assembly of 575...
...Fabius made no bones about abandoning the former government's emphasis on state control of the economy and radical social reforms, adopting instead the fashionable rhetoric of "modernization," but the Socialist administration continued to do badly in the polls, held responsible for high unemployment and the inevitable disappointment that followed the high hopes of 1981...
...At this point the Socialists began to panic, since they could no longer count on a majority of the assembly once the runoffs were completed the following week...
...But then Mitterrand was always more of a political artist than a thinker...
...But Communist presidential candidates always do worse than their local representatives, as a result of the party's special strength in local and inner-city politics, and anyway the improvement was small...
...The only stated policy to date, building a parliamentary and national coalition around the Socialists and thus laying the ground for an enduring left-center majority, is far from certain to succeed...
...In this they were mildly successful...
...Once again, the Socialists have come out best...
...At the first round of the legislative elections, on June 5, only 65 percent of the electorate turned out to vote, in contrast to the usually high level of voting in France (in the two rounds of the presidential election six weeks earlier, the turnout had been 82 percent and 85 percent, which was about the norm...
...He appointed a Socialist prime Minister (Michel Rocard) and dissolved the assembly...
...Mitterrand, the Fourth Republic politician who condemned de Gaulle's constitution as tantamount to a "permanent coup d'etat," has manipulated his predecessor's institutions brilliantly...
...Until then, the PS, like Mitterrand, had been superbly confident of success, so much so that both Mitterrand and Rocard had given speeches warning of the dangers of single-party domination...
...Mitterrand also hoped that the PS would seem the natural party of refuge for hesitant centrists horrified at the rise of the National Front and the willingness of conservative leaders to acknowledge the legitimacy of its hectoring propaganda of hatred...
...In the first he was eminently successful: the directly elected president supervises all areas of public life, either through his own office or through the prime minister whom he appoints...
...Had it not been for the low turnout in June, which magnified the presence of the loyal Communist voters, the party would have been seen to be, as it clearly is, in precipitate decline, supported only in its heartlands of central and northern France and content to get 10 percent of the vote where once it could expect close to a third of the vote in some districts...
...Its founder and first president, Charles de Gaulle, designed its constitution to achieve two overriding goals: to secure political stability by concentrating power in the hands of a strong presidency, and to exclude the left from political control...
...Now, with a week between rounds, they worked feverishly to get out the vote...
...But not a majority...
...in order to capture the votes of the center, the Socialist party entered the contest with its identity and its program firmly muffled...
...In the second his legacy endured through 1981—until that year all governmental and parliamentary offices were exclusively in the hands of the right...
...His historic achievement will have been the transformation of the non-Communist left into a party and a movement capable of winning elections and securing office...
...The purpose of this was to avoid the FALL • 1988 • 399 Comments and Opinions charge of a return to the heady "revolutionary" dreams of 1981, which would, it was feared, alienate an electorate which had been content with the cohabitation of the past two years...
...0 FALL • 1988 • 401 402 • DISSENT Mayday 1986 in San Salvador (Adam KufeldamPAci VISUALS...
...Two concerns focused the attention of political observers: would Mitterrand run again (he is in his seventies), and how would Le Pen fare, in a France now so obsessed with the "immigrant problem" that even some Socialists were offering hard-line solutions to hold the white vote...
...And by illustrating in his own person the proposition that Socialists could take power in de Gaulle's Republic without provoking institutional chaos, he has laid the groundwork for political stability in the country (which was a major subliminal theme in his electoral campaign and undoubtedly contributed to its success...
...He has marginalized the Communists, divided his opponents and assisted into the limelight a Socialist party that is now social democratic in all but name...
...The Socialists' defeat was cushioned by the system of proportional representation, introduced by Mitterrand precisely to limit the likely electoral damage...
...This was an unprecedented situation...
...The Socialists secured 35 percent of the vote, the coalition of right and center parties 38 percent, the Communists just over 11 percent and the candidates of the National Front 9.7 percent...
...In one sense, Mitterrand then proceeded to repeat his strategy of 1981...
...In addition to the votes of the left, Mitterrand benefited from some of Le Pen's voters' dislike of the "official" right, and he defeated Chirac by a margin of 55 percent to 45 percent, a landslide in French electoral terms...
...But the result of this, with the Socialists avoiding the very word "socialism" and presenting their candidates as "the supporters of the president," was to numb much of the electorate into boredom...
...Mitterrand appointed a Socialist prime minister, and a coalition government of Socialists and Communists held office until 1984, when Mitterrand replaced his first prime minister, Pierre Mauroy (an old-line Socialist with strong labor backing) with a "technocratic" young Socialist, Laurent Fabius...
...The shocking news was Le Pen's success in mobilizing 14 percent of the vote behind his xenophobic, populist, neoracist message...
...The National Front still has wide backing, especially in eastern and southern France (and everywhere that African or Arab minorities have settled), but at this point it is too dependent on the charisma of its leader to succeed in the parliamentary electoral system...
...The National Front is not about to seize control of French politics, as some feared in the aftermath of Le Pen's dramatic success in the presidential elections (where he was within two percentage points of the established, respectable Barre...
...No allowance is made in the constitution for the presence in office of a president lacking a parliamentary majority, and for two years Mitterrand and Chirac jockeyed for power...
...As a result of the new rules, the Socialists did better than expected and the Communists were all but wiped out, while the far-right National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen secured parliamentary representation for the first time...
...But here history failed to repeat...
...The elections were run on the old system of single member majority voting (one of the first acts of Chirac's majority in 1986 had been to restore this system at the expense of Mitterrand's proportional method), and the results were monumentally indecisive...
...Mitterrand's own position as president was unaffected—presidential elections are scheduled every seven years, whereas the assembly has a maximum life of five years—but he had to accept "cohabitation" with the leader of the Gaullist party, Jacques Chirac, who duly received appointment as prime minister...
...At the second round of the legislative elections the turnout improved a little (to 70 percent, still very low), and the Socialists won a clear plurality of seats...
...But since it has been Mitterrand's singular achievement to render the Socialists independent of the declining Communist party, Rocard (not in any case much of a favorite in Communist circles) has presented a new cabinet where Socialists constitute just fifty percent of the members, the rest of the places going to independents and other figures from the political center...
...In the legislative elections of 1986, a coalition of right and center groupings regained control of the assembly...
Vol. 35 • September 1988 • No. 4
