Dauphins prepare

FRANCE MARC ULLMANN

Paris—In France the Sphinx has two faces. No longer do we weigh up, analyse, interpret and

balance the sayings and silences of General de Gaulle alone. There are also the sayings and silences of one of the candidates for his job: Valdry Giscard d'Estaing.

Giscard is forty-one. He leads the Indepen- dent Republicans—all thirty-nine of them. With- out them de Gaulle would lose his parliamentary majority. And ever since, a fortnight ago, Gis- card interrupted the torpors of August with the public expression of 'his anxiety about the way

in which the solitary exercise of personal power is failing to prepare the country for the future'

he has become the star attraction on the French political stage. The communists denounce him as the `right-winger who represents the biggest threat for the future'; the faithful gaullists are torn between the desire to denounce him as a blasphemer and the need to keep their links with the man who looks like being their best bet for the next presidential campaign.

For the strange fact is that with five years of the General's mandate still to run the presiden- tial 'primaries' seem to have started already.

Relations between M. Giscard d'Estaing and Prime Minister Georges Pompidou—the heir presumptive and the heir apparent—are just about as cordial, just about as lacking in arrieres-pensees, as those between President Johnson and Bobby Kennedy.

In short the French have started to talk politics again. Every deputy returning to Paris from his holiday visit to his constituency reports the same phenomenon. His electors are worry- ing about the future. It looks as though the General's recent jeux d'esprit have served to remind us that he's nearly seventy-seven. Not that the electors think he's 'past it': he plainly is nothing of the kind. But rather they begin to feel that he suffers from 'fixations'—which can hardly be denied.

There has been no disastrous slump in his popularity. According to the latest opinion poll almost one Frenchman in two-49 per cent, to be precise—think he should carry on to the end of his term. A year ago they were in a majority (52 per cent). So there has probably been a slight falling-off in popular enthusiasm. Still, for someone who has, in the last three months, slashed Health Service benefits, increased bus and train fares, affronted the popular sympathy for Israel and provoked widespread incompre- hension with his support for 'free Quebec,' a 3 per cent loss of popular support can hardly be described as catastrophic. Nor has he lost the magic touch. Immediately before his last tele- vision broadcast only 34 per cent of those ques- tioned said they would vote for him in a presi- dential election at the present time: a week later the figure had jumped to 42 per cent (for pur- poses of comparison the General gathered 45 per cent of the votes in the first round of the presidential elections in October, 1965).

Still, there is a new atmosphere of uncertainty. And M. Giscard d'Estaing has been quick to exploit it. The future, he reckons, lies with the politician who can claim to have supported the General without at the same time having appeared an 'unconditional' gaullist in a country which, when the time comes, will be wanting a change of sorts. Hence the slogan 'Yes—but.' 'Yes' means belonging to the parliamentary majority and avoiding a parliamentary crisis; it means voting for the 'special powers' demanded by the government back in June. 'But' means the public assertion of independence from time to time in ways that can be exploited when the presidential elections eventually take place: things like the recent act of calculated insubord- ination.

Equivocal like the constitution itself, this behaviour, half-parliamentary, half-presidential, infuriates the General. So does Giscard's charac- ter. This gifted and well-heeled young man, he reckons, is the very stuff that traitors are made of. Once he took over the reins what would be

'Your salary is now £8,500, an increase of approximately 127 per cent. What we've got to do is stop this sort of thing happening anywhere else.' left of the gaullist strategy, and above all of the General's foreign policy? No stone has been left unturned to discredit the infant prodigy. M. Michel Debrd, Finance Minister and archetypal gaullist, interviewed about Giscard's outburst on the radio, found no epithets too harsh for his predecessor's behaviour. The Gaullist party machine was quick to publish a declaration condemning his 'lack of solidarity' and to serve notice on his parliamentary followers that their leader's attitude could cost them the gaullist coupon at a future parliamentary election.

Giscard has not deigned to reply. He has gone off on holiday instead. He has no desire to rush things. On the contrary. He wants M. Pompidou to have all the time in the world to grow stale in the shadow of his master. Then, when the time does come, he will appear to the gaullists as the best compromise between the desire to preserve the General's inheritance and the need for a change of style.

So far in life Giscard has enjoyed a magic touch. At two of the 'grandes ecoles,' the Poly- technique and the Ecole Nationale d'Adminis- tration, he carried all before him. There fol- lowed a meteoric career in government leading to the Finance Ministry at the age of thirty-six. His need now is to appeal to his countrymen as `one of them' before they will feel like choosing him to lead them, He tries hard. He projects an impression of austerity by rejecting invitations to dine out in town, while at the same time having himself photographed at work in a trendy sweater in preference to a more formal waist- coat. Unfortunately it all still seems a bit laboured: too much of a tailor-made perfor- mance, and not enough of a personal adventure.

Meanwhile, M. Pompidou, who owes his more folksy reputation to the combination of modest origins and an epicurean temperament, consoles himself with the thought that tailor-made per- formances are always reserved for the second rank.