The Summer of French Discontent

...Decisions are patchy and abstract—privatizing a bank here, a television channel there—at a moment when people want boldness in areas directly affecting their lives, such as measures to boost individual and local initiative...

...L'Huma—as the paper is popularly known—knows what it is writing about...

...At the end of July...

...Thus a dogmatic stand on this issue could lose a politician as many votes as it could win...

...And during August he startled his political opponents by dropping his hitherto harsh attacks on the government and seeking to show that Chirac's policies are simply a watereddown version of his own...

...In mid-August a group of young skinheads picked a fight with a North African youth in Châteauroux, in the center of France...

...People grouched that five weeks' annual leave is not enough...

...The Communist Party has lost to Le Pen's National Front many voters who apparently see little difference between the two parties' nationalistic hostility to the European Community and to "multinational" companies...

...Two thirds of the population, they say, believes France is going into a decline...

...Other healthy democracies like Britain and the United States have in the past gone through self-searching moods, so France is no different in this from its friends...

...The trial was fully reported in the media, and in reasserting mankind's right to dignity and freedom, the 100 or so witnesses, many of them elderly crippled victims of Nazism, may have helped to heighten faith in democracy...

...Some of the Prime Minister's Rightwing followers, noting that the National Front has nibbled into his electorate, have recommended acceptance of the invitation in order to secure the presidency...

...Intraparty bickering and related political hesitancy are all grist for Le Pen...

...Thoughtful Socialist leaders are troubled by the bankruptcy of their daily, Le Matin, because it suggests President François Mitterrand cannot muster a following enthusiastic enough to support a party sheet in a country where a paper can survive on a thin circulation of 400,000...

...Journalists and pollsters linked the disgruntlement over holidays and work to the self-criticism they claim to have detected this summer...

...In an interview in the Left-of-Center daily Libération, he criticized the "avoidable mistakes and misjudgments" the Socialist government committed between 1981-86...

...Le Pen has been winning applause from his constituency for promising to be a tough bargainer between the first and second rounds...

...With luck, France's usually relaxed atmosphere should soon return...

...Moderates—to quote Commerce Minister Michel Noir—say they prefer to "lose the election rather than lose our soul...

...Insecurity in large cities and unemployment—now running at 11 per cent and still rising—seem to be the factors causing the greatest unease about the future...

...Moreover, he seems merely to half-believe in his own policies...

...Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...

...An opinion poll conducted in late August found the country evenly divided on the question of immigrants voting in French elections—a right at present denied to all foreigners...

...He is "feeding on the deception and discontent resulting from the political austerity of the past few years," the Communist daily L'Humanité wrote on August 17...

...Current opinion polls put Mitterrand ahead of rival contenders, including Chirac...

...But, less rosily than Lang, some observers reckon that Mitterrand's rating will drop in the coming months...

...Longterm economic prospects are tolerably good...

...In addition, he invited Chirac not to wait for the elections to pursue what he described as an "unavoidable" agreement with the National Front...

...They view with concern the way his party both feeds on and fuels the resentment that is building up in many cities against France's 3 million Arab and African immigrant workers...

...In contrast to hat-trick Margaret, Chirac is having difficulty holding his government together...

...In mid-August, Michel Rocard, a former minister who aspires to succeed Mitterrand as president and party leader, blamed the Socialists for their wilting appeal...

...To date, Chirac has lined up with the moderates...

...But if the polls show National Front support remaining steady or, worse, growing, he may be tempted to make a deal...

...Furthermore, not all is as bleak as Le Pen would have the sunbathers believe...

...Their mood was not only due to erratic atmospherics that produced nasty storms in the Alps and scrub fires in the sun-scorched Midi...

...investments and company profits are rising, and labor costs are falling...

...nevertheless, the regime here clings to the 17th-century monarchy's idea of economic power based on grand state projects dreamt up in Paris offices...

...The very thought of a respected leader associating with Le Pen is one more source of gloom for many middle-of-the-road voters...

...That the current introspection is linked to a growing awareness that politicians neither work miracles nor hold magic answers to all problems is a sign of political maturity...

...The Socialists and Conservatives may be losing their attractiveness as they quibble and grope for new ideas, but voters are trickling, not rushing, to the National Front...

...Le Pen won 10 per cent of the ballots in last year's Parliamentary election, and polls show his backing (o be constant...

...An untiring, abrasive man who has in a short time become an inspiration for cartoonists and one of France's bestknown politicians, Le Pen plans to run for the French presidency in '88...

...His objective is to win enough votes to make his bark-like voice heard...

...Next year's presidential election will be "a kind of referendum for or against democracy," Lang said last month, adding that Mitterrand would win...

...The French Constitution, by requiring a runoff in constituencies where no candidate receives 50 per cent of the votes cast, gives small parties clout...

...Their standard bearers step out of unsettled races and invite their supporters to vote for the survivor offering the most concessions...

...He now hopes to push his strength up to 17 per cent by waving the faded flag of patriotism...

...The disillusionment that led voters last year to withdraw their confidence from Socialists and support a Liberal-Conservative alliance now seems to be veering toward Chirac and his team...

...The American example has shown that many ideas and jobs originate in smallto-medium businesses...

...A majority accepted that France is less productive than Germany or Japan, yet were mortified to learn that it has even slipped behind Italy—like Spain, long considered a jolly easygoing neighbor...

...Rocard was thus distancing himself from Socialists like Jack Lang, Mitterrand's former Third-worldist culture minister, who traces all of France's ills to the present Conservative government and also questions Prime Minister Jacques Chirac's democratic credentials...

...In August he stomped the beaches from Dunkirk to Nice, selling his political message to people who lay on the sand feeling, they said, morose...

...Indeed, commentators tend to agree that both the Socialist and Conservative parties appear to be of f color, and that the general despondency, morosité, may have spread from them to the rest of society...

...So far, he has disappointed those who hoped to find in him the fiber of first-term President Reagan or of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher...

...Mayors compete to wrest power from the government as well as to make their cities more attractive to live in...

...Mitterrand and Thatcher signed a treaty that parts the seas for the digging of the "Chunnel...

...The heat and holidays drive millions of people out of the cities to the coasts and mountains...

...Fortunately such anti-Semitism may turn voters away from Le Pen, for a healthy majority of French people welcomed the trial in the spring of former Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, and the life sentence he subsequently received for "crimes against humanity" committed under his orders in Lyons during World War II...

...until then, morosité helps to stimulate political thinking, this summer will have proved that there is alter all a sunnier side to doubt...

...In his seaside rallies this summer he defended small shopkeepers and national grandeur, denigrated international companies and foreign workers, and tried to politicize the crime rate and AIDS...

...The most active was Jean-Marie Le Pen, the peripatetic leader of the farRight National Front...

...This year, though, not all the politicians put down their knives to observe a seasonal truce...

...City and regional councils, benefiting little from Mitterrand's timid decentralization, continue to chafe under the capital's rule, and the government is shying away from difficult yet increasingly necessary reforms in secondary and university education...

...According to an opinion poll published in July, 75 per cent want more time off, despite the fact that half of those asked said they thought the French do not work enough...

...they then accused police who arrested them of being "controlled by Jews" and therefore "biased...

...others declare that if the President is reelected, it may well be faute de mieux...

...Jews, too, are occasionally the National Front's target...

...Discontent, however, has spread to politics and to the way the country is being run...