Back in the box?
FRANCE MARC ULLMANN
Paris—On Sunday the first round of the French general election takes place. The voters are then supposed to shut the unexpected demons that were first set loose by the students of Nan- terre safely back in the ballot boxes. This is the General's conjuring trick: and his country- men appreciate his prestidigitatory skill. But just as with any other conjuring trick, they ask themselves whether the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. In other words, what happens after the trick is over? They are told that the elections will solve all their problems. But they wonder whether they will not rather turn out to be an entr'acte, followed by a movement back to the barricades again in the autumn.
To which the politicians, being politicians, reply, 'no—provided you vote for me.' One after another, the old faces and the new faces appear on television, and tell us that the trouble- makers were the other chaps : they were the upholders of law and order. I have watched each of the five national leaders give his tele- vision address; and it may be useful for readers on the other side of the Channel to be given my thumbnail sketches. As the old French proverb has it, 'a tout seigneur, tout honneur.' Let us start with Georges Pompidou. Bushy of eyebrow, incisive of voice, his face lined with the cares of office, here above all was the man of purpose. Gaullism, he told us, is simply the best defence of the Republic and our liber- ties against the danger of 'totalitarian com- munism' and its allies. The course of wisdom, therefore, is the election of 'a massive and homogeneous majority.' The word 'homo- geneous' was chosen advisedly, and it was aimed at M Valery Giscard d'Estaing, leader of the forty-two Independent Republicans, the former allies of the Gaullists in the outgoing Parliament, and the coiner of the slogan 'Yes, but! . . .' There might have been a lot less dis- order in recent weeks, one was led to under- stand, if M Giscard d'Estaing had not en- couraged the opposition to speculate on the likelihood of the Independent Republicans joining their ranks.
To which, it goes without saying, M Giscard d'Estaing replied with a flat contradiction. The trouble, according to him, was that the govern- ment had never indulged in that 'dialogue' which is the 'in' word of the moment. Having said which, this elegant forty-two year old hastened to agree with the Prime Minister—he knows where his group's electoral interests lie : the real enemy is communism.
M Jacques Duhamel, the leader of the centre, and successor to M Jean Lecanuet of brief and happy memory, was nothing if not modern.
'Buy the Centre, it's the cheapest and the best': that might sum up, not unfairly, his message.
M Duhamel wanted 'reforms without adven- tures': he, at any rate, could be relied upon not to team up with the Communists like M Fran- cois Mitterrand, leader of the Federation of the Left.
So let us turn to M Mitterrand. Protagonist of adventure? You should have seen him. Dis- order, it transpires, was the other face of Gaullism : a Gaullism which had learnt none of the realities of the modern world, and which, having brought the nation to the very edge of civil war, sought refuge behind the rifle butts of the army. The only genuine stability was the stability of the left. A government of the left would rely on the popular will; and it was a slander to suggest that it would be 'taken over.' Taken over by whom? M Mitterrand was tact- ful enough not to say. But his audience was expected to understand that he was referring to the Communists.
Finally, therefore, we must come to the monster in the wings himself : M Waldeck Rochet, general secretary of the French Com- munist Party. Kindly note the word 'French': M Waldeck Rochet left his red flag in the cloakroom. 'The Gaullists have the nerve to try and take over the tricolour. They should be ashamed of themselves; the national emblem belongs to all of us.' In his slow Burgundian peasant's voice M Waldeck Rochet assured us that it was in fact the Communist party which was the party of law and order, which had 'shown its sense of responsibility.' And just in case this were not enough to satisfy an electorate which above all wants tranquillity, he assured us that the only totalitarians around were the Gaullists. 'They want power for them- selves alone. We, the workers' party, ask for nothing more than our fair share in a coalition.' This is really the heart of the problem. For the majority of electors the choice on Sunday depends on the answer to one simple question : are the Communists a party like the rest, which could safely participate in government?
In a sense the answer ought to be 'yes.' Throughout the days of crisis the Communist party consistently resisted the pressures to take the road of revolution. Never a day passed when they did not denounce 'the irresponsibility of the ultra-leftists.' The vast majority of their supporters made it clear that they were not opening the factory doors to the students; and it was the Communist activists who offered the strongest resistance to those who wanted to disrupt the social order. How better could the party have demonstrated its integration in the 'system' than by its determined efforts to divert revolutionary fervour into a traditional cam- paign for wage increases? And what could be more reassuring than Communists in search of a television set or a better car?
Yet these arguments lack conviction. There has been a remarkable revival of the bogey of the 'red peril' in the minds of bourgeois voters, made up of conscious and unconscious, explicit and implicit, fears.
Foremost among the explicit fears is the, conviction that you cannot increase wages by £1,250 million in six months and get away with it, and any party which suggests you can must be dishonest. But the implicit counterpart of this fear is the realisation that, not only did the Communists demand such increases, they got them. The great mass of French conserva- tives have felt the ground shaking under their feet. They sense the end of an era during which, for thirty years, large numbers of reforms could be rejected out of hand because they were demanded by a party not of reformers but of revolutionaries.
This assumption has been assaulted from two directions at once. On one side a new force more revolutionary than the Communists has appeared, demolishing the myth that the rest of the nation only had to sit tight and leave the Communists to brick themselves up in their ghetto. On the other, the fact that the Com- munists have been operating as a bastion of the established order carries the risk that they will be given a status of respectability at a time when the wage demands they are -backing demonstrate that their sense of responsibility remains strictly limited after all.
In these conditions the losers in the elections could turn out to be not the Communists, who can still rely on most of their loyal voters, but M Mitterrand and his friends who, since the last presidential elections, have dragged the parties of the non-communist left into electoral alliance with their powerful neighbours. At any rate, the fate of the Mitterrand group will have a decisive impact on the future course of French politics. If it gains seats, or even simply holds its own, this could herald a profound change in the stance of the Communist party, leading eventually to the formation of a genuine left-wing coalition which would not lose its essentially 'Labour' character by em- bracing the Communists. If, however, M Mitterrand and his friends are decimated, then we shall have an Italian-style political struc- ture, with a huge centre-right grouping pick- ing up and dropping the support of the small splinter parties of the non-Communist left according to the hazards of electoral fortunes.
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