Playing Politics in France
VALLS-RUSSELL, JANICE
WITH AN EYE ON THE ELYSEE Playing Politics in France BY JANICE VALLS-RUSSELL Paris France's political class has entered the 1990s in search of new leaders and new ideas. Among the...
...Nevertheless, he has now set up a United Force organization for non-Socialist democrats that could, if successful, prove the embryo of a future nonGaullist party...
...OnFebruary 21 Giscard d'Estaing proposed a union between his party and the RPR...
...Delors started out in politics as a Christian Democrat keen on social reform...
...Henceforth, Chirac warned, anyone " embarking on initiatives meeting with [party] disapproval would have to take their leave" of the RPR...
...For the present, Chirac seems to be closer to the line advocated by Pasqua, who is contemptuous of the rénovateurs and irritated by the Euro-enthusiasm they share with the UDF...
...Rocard, who looks to the center for additional support, let his Education Minister entangle himself in headcloths before cleverly setting up his own think tank on immigration...
...When asked about his future, he repues that time is on his side...
...Other centrists predict a shrunken RPR moving right ward to provide a bui wark against the National Front, as the expelled or self-exiled rénovateurs and the rest of the non-Communist opposition reorganize on less nationalist, more pragmatic lines...
...by rallying a new generation of French people from all social backgrounds around a common passion, France...
...But his record was badly dented by his forlorn claim before the National Assembly that he was taken by surprise when French agents sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, killing a photographer...
...Its mission is to work out the details of a two-pronged policy consisting of an efficient clampdown on illegal immigrants, and measures to improve the lot of those who have already settled in France...
...He received 68 per cent—only, observers agreed, because Pasqua chose to tone down his pugnacity to save him from a humiliating defeat...
...There are three main contenders for Mitterrand's mantle as the country heads toward the 1993 presidential elections: the Education Minister, Lionel Jospin...
...only if we are united can we beat Socialism...
...the Prime Minister, Michel Rocard...
...But there is no love lost between the two men...
...the Gaullist Rally for the Republic (RPR), led by former Prime Minister Jacques Chirac...
...He wants to enable people to continue living in such places, even if few are farmers, and to preserve the countryside for themselves and for tourists...
...Their scapegoat appears to have been Michèle Barzach, a former Health Minister who ironically lost her seat after supporting Chirac against Pasqua...
...She promptly attributed her misfortune to "the fact that I am a woman," to a "bunker" leadership on the defensive, and to her sympathies for the rénovateurs...
...He can afford to: After becoming France's first Socialist President, he is enjoying a second term in office that does not end before 1995...
...But unions are not always unconditional supporters of Socialist governments today, as recent strikes have shown, nor are they as strong as they once were...
...Both are crosspolitical products of France's Fifth Republic, shaped by its two most influential Presidents...
...He is, it seems, too moderate for the taste of the majority...
...During his two years in office he steered the economy away from the inflationary excesses that had existed under his predecessor, Pierre Mauroy...
...The UDF shares Delors' undogmatic economic outlook and his wish to speed up monetary and political union within the European Community...
...In contrast, the rénovateurs, headed by Michel Noir, think the moment has come to melt down the UDF and the RPR into a big "American-style Republican Party...
...Behind this rhetorical smoke screen, the RPR is undergoing a test of strength between orthodox Gaullists and reformists...
...Noir, in fact, ismore popular with voters than with fellow politicians...
...The RPR is attracted to Chevènement's mistrust of the Soviet Union and his attachment to France's nuclear force de frappe...
...An angry Chirac threatened to resign unless he obtained two-thirds of the assembled members' votes...
...Dismayed by Chirac's withdrawn indecisiveness since his defeat in the 1988 presidential election (in the first round he won 19.9 per cent of the vote, barely five points more than Le Pen while Mitterrand scored 34.1 per cent), Pasqua criticized the RPR's apparent drifting at the February convention...
...This reflects his general interest in environmental matters, an issue that he and other Socialists agree should not be left to the Greens...
...and the far-Right National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen...
...De Gaulle scorned political parties, but he soon found that even he needed the backing of an organization, which was baptized first "union" then "rassemblement" (rally...
...Among the neo-Gaullists a few young rebels— rénovateurs—are celebrating this year's centenary of Charles de Gaulle's birth by proposing to bury Gaullism, and are being threatened with expulsion by their nostalgic seniors...
...Pasqua has tried to win voters away from the National Front by declaring that the two parties "share common values," including a nationalist mistrust of the European Community's "supranational technocracy...
...Fabius, the youngest of the three contenders, was only 37 when he became Prime Minister in 1984...
...His large-is-best outlook is a leftover from a now dated Socialist fondness for big, nationalized industries, and for powerful trade unions...
...In the oppositecamp, Socialists are arguing about what Socialism should stand for during the coming decade, and bickering over who should eventually succeed President François Mitterrand as party leader...
...Still, the centrist Raymond Barre, an ex-Prime Minister, is pessimistic...
...Two more Socialists with friends in the center-right who have their eyes on the Elysée Palace are Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission, and Jean-Pierre Chevènement, Rocard's Defense Minister...
...He maintains that the duty of the public sector is, for example, to subsidize, not close down schools, post offices and transportation in underpopulated rural areas...
...In 1989 they represented 11 per cent of the workforce, against 20 per cent in 1981...
...Thus, while Jospin's ambivalence in the course of the school controversy made him appear devoid of the resolve one expects from a potential president, Rocard came across as a constructive realist, concerned alike with the dangers and injustice of immigration—a sensitive subject in France...
...Unlike Chirac and Giscard d'Estaing, Mitterrand has realized for some time that he must make room for a younger successor...
...Yet, in less than two years, his hostility to Pasqua's flirtations with the electorate of the National Front—"it is better to lose an election than one's soul"—has won him headlines, the mayoralty of Lyons, France's second-largest city, and a rating in opinion polls that is well ahead of Chirac's andPasqua's...
...School officials finally persuaded the girls to remove them, thus defusing tension in a system with a high proportion of immigrant students...
...Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...
...A week later, the two men were sufficiently reconciled to carve out the RPR's political bureau in similar proportions— with the exception, that is, of four seats they left to the rénovateurs...
...and Laurent Fabius, a former Prime Minister...
...Jospin has tarnished his image in the eyes of teachers (who tend to vote Socialist) by favoring factory-sized schools and advocating the closing of small ones...
...Pasqua and the party's right wing favor electoral alliances with the UDF, but believe that the rest of the time the RPR should stick to its Gaullistprinciples...
...The UDF is in the throes of change as well...
...Meanwhile, Chirac indulged in wishful thinking: "Our movement must be strong, popular, democratic, and open...
...He has since polished his style and cultivated an unruffled, unhurried manner...
...Party" was not in the Gaullist vocabulary, and to this day the right side of the French political spectrum consists of the (non-Gaullist) Union for French Democracy (UDF), a patchwork of center-Right groups stitched together by former President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing...
...In his view, the two parties would have to "disintegrate before reassembling on new lines...
...The next day, an opinion poll revealed that this was what 71 per cent of their electorate wanted, too...
...The message was clearly intended for Noir, who was booed at the convention...
...Chevènement belonged to the left wing of the Socialist Party before becoming the most Gaullist of Mitterrandists...
...Last fall Jospin also disconcerted many Socialist sympathizers by hedging when a few Moslem, North-African girls insisted on wearing their headcloths during class, in defiance of the secular tradition of French public education...
...At the RPR convention in February, former Interior Minister Charles Pasqua urged the Gaullists " to defy the party system...
...Fabius prefers decentralization to old-fashioned Socialism...
Vol. 73 • March 1990 • No. 4
