France's Father Figure

...His interior minister and campaign manager, Charles Pasqua, openly fished in Le Pen's murky electoral waters by declaring that the neo-Gaullists shared some of the far Right's values...

...Mitterrand topped the 18-to-35-year olds' popularity chart, winning 35 per cent of their votes on April 24 and nearly 70 per cent on May 8. The youth of 1968, who liked to say that a man over 40 was a fool, would have been horrified at the idea of voting for a 72-yearold...

...He increased his National Front's tally from 10 percentin the 1986 parliamentary elections to 14.4 per cent now, mainly by fanning prejudice against France's 2.5 million or so nonwhite immigrants and extolling the virtues of "travail, famille, patrie" (work, family, homeland...

...Chirac took the credit for these developments, and initially they seemed a boon to his presidential bid...

...While the Socialists emerged from the second round of balloting with the largest Assembly bloc, winning 276 seats out of a total of 577, they remained a minority, leaving Rocard without a clear mandate to govern...

...Young people have nicknamed him Tonton (Uncle...

...But there has been a swing in the pendulum of fashion...

...Neither the name nor the roseand-fist emblem of his party appeared on the campaign posters, which portrayed him in profile, gazing aloofly into the deep distant blue...

...Chirac's attempt to rake in votes from both Le Pen's and Barre's supporters was his downfall...

...many felt he talked excessively about Europe and not enough about France...

...He took as his slogan "La France Unie" In a gloss on Mitterrand's campaign style, a satirical television program starred the President as a frog that thought it was God...

...Four fringe men, fielded by the environmentalists and by a medley of rival Marxists opposed to the mainstream Communists, together drew a mere 8.26 per cent of the vote...

...The failure of any parliamentary grouping to garner a majority will inevitably usher in a period of what one Socialist Party strategist has referred to as "experimentation...

...Voters respected, but yawned at, the plodding patience with which this one-time academic tried to explain his economic program...

...The " Vive la France" atmosphere that characterized the two rounds of the French presidential contest (April 24 and May 8) suggests it may be...

...President Assad [of Syria] for his personal involvement...

...The President understood that voters wanted no major upheavals...

...in 1968 fears that the May riots would unleash a revolution...

...A majority of the electorate seemed to welcome Mitterrand's maneuver (although outgoing Assembly Speaker Jacques Chaban-Delmas was of the opinion that it would have been more constitutional if the new Rocard government had first faced a vote of no-confidence...

...For months he played on his opponents' and his followers' nerves by delaying the announcement of his candidacy...

...As the wellpublicized expectation that he would run again grew, so did his ratings in the polls...

...He sedulously avoided the word "Socialist...

...Those were the three watchwords of Philippe Pétain, Hitler's puppet president in Vichy France...

...He had already observed how the anxieties aroused by the Left-leaning experiments he had launched after his election in 1981 had enabled Chirac to lead a Center-Right alliance to victory in the 1986 parliamentary balloting...

...After May 8, some commentators seemed to agree, noting that Mitterrand is the only President since de Gaulle to have won a second term...

...Barre was too dignified to pull demagogic tricks out of his sleeve...

...Political "cohabitation" with Chirac was a gift for Mitterrand...

...Nevertheless, when "François II" steps down from his throne, he displays a warm sympathy and a witty irony that appeal to all ages...

...Reaching toward the center in this way would be in keeping with Mitterrand's manifest goal of a "France unie...

...Of the nine candidates in the first round, the five who resisted nationalist temptations scored disappointingly...

...Le Pen's National Front was virtually wiped out, in part as a result of the elimination of the proportional representation voting system...

...in universities they scrawled "Tonton, hang on, we're coming" between the two presidential electoral rounds...

...His pragmatism and undogmatic campaign attracted 16.5 per cent of thetotal...

...Except for a few Socialists who favored moving more slowly, Mitterrand's fellow party members were also pleased by the prospect of cashing in on their leader's success...

...Perhaps worse, Chirac's insistence that no humiliating deal had been made in Lebanon was undermined by his statement thanking "the Iranian government for its help...

...Any doubts about that were dispelled by the balloting for a new National Assembly this month, in which the Socialists fell short of the parliamentary majority they had fondly expected on the heels of their leader's victory...

...Le Pen used them to draw a nostalgic response from people who feel that with double-digit unemployment, rampant divorce, waves of immigration, and the trend toward greater European unity, France is no longer what it used to be...

...Political discussion centered on whether or not he would be the Socialist standard bearer...

...As if Pasqua's remark was not enough to unsettle moderate voters, aspectacular coincidence hit the headlines on May 5. Two sets of hostages were freed within a few hours: a group of 23 gendarmes (rural policemen) who had been ambushed in New Caledonia on April 24, and three Frenchmen who had been kidnapped in Lebanon in 1985...

...however, neither side seems much inclined to re-establish the old "union of the Left...

...Emboldened by his impressive victory, Mitterrand decided that he and Michel Rocard, whom he appointed Prime Minister to replace Chirac, would not be shackled to a National Assembly with a CenterRight majority...

...No longer involved in daily affairs, he was able to cultivate a detached manner and to groom himself as the father-figure the French electorate seems to need every other decade...

...Soon, though, it emerged that 21 people had died in the rescue operation in New Caledonia...

...it retained a single seat, Toulon, and Le Pen himself was defeated in Marseilles...

...Certainly the reelection of François Mitterrand, who won 54 per cent of the votes on May 8, had more to do with nationalism than Socialism...

...Chirac, the runner-up at 19.9 per cent, earned the right to stand in the second round against front-runner Mitterrand, who captured 34.1 per cent...

...Chirac's reluctance to criticize Pasqua for this led a number of Barre partisans to cast their ballots for Mitterrand...

...The same cannot be said of the two candidates who sandwiched him, Le Pen and Chirac...

...The real Mitterrand behaved as if he thought he was de Gaulle...

...other centrists simply stayed home...

...But they were in good measure disappointed...

...In contrast, 72-year-old Mitterrand seemed reassuringly lofty, serene and mellow...

...The electorate was harsh as well with former centrist Prime Minister Raymond Barre...

...So he dissolved the body —as in 1981—and announced parliamentary elections for June 5 and 12...

...More likely Rocard will seek the cooperation of the 50 or so moderates in the conservative coalition who have just formed the Union of the Center and plan to act as an autonomous formation...

...When, barely a month before the first round, Mitterrand finally threw his hat in the ring, he justified the decision by stressing the need to rescue France from the "quarrels and divisions" between "parties, groups and factions...

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

...De Gaulle too had twice dissolved the National Assembly, each time using a crisis to broaden his support: In 1962 it was an assassination attempt...

...and a friend of France and Iran" The Prime Minister's heavy-handed efforts to persuade voters that he was de Gaulle's natural heir thus boomeranged...

...Le Pen was the arch-nationalist of the campaign...

...The Rightist coalition that had previously enjoyed legislative control ended up with 271 seats, and the Communists salvaged 27...

...Dads, and even granddads, are in again...

...The satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné portrays Mitterrand these days as it used to de Gaulle: in regal robes, wearing a crown and holding a sceptre...

...Numerically, Mitterrand's party could dominate the legislature by aligning with the Communists...

...Mitterrand and three of the other contenders for the Elysée Palace—outgoing conservative Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, the Communist Party's André Lajoinie and far Right tubthumper JeanMarie Le Pen—often sounded in their campaign speeches less like men with clear goals for the next seven years than like a chorus paying anniversary tributes to Charles de Gaulle, who brought himself to power on May 13,195 8. Just as the General promised to "rescue" France from the "ridiculous games" of political parties and to quiet anticolonial unrest in French Algeria, they talked of the need to "gather" (rassembler, a word dear to de Gaulle) the citizenry above and beyond political boundaries and to restore peace, somehow, in New Caledonia, a French territory in the Pacific where the ethnic population is demanding independence...