Giscard pays the price
Sam White
Paris Immediately it became apparent that the Communist vote had dropped by five per cent and Giscard's by an equal amount compared to his 1974 score, Mitterrand's chances of winning in the second round of the French presidential elections next Sunday moved from the possible to the probable. The probability increased when the Communists in an act of unconditional . surrender, at least until after the election, committed their voters to Mitterrand's side while Chirac's Gaullists, with 18 per cent of the vote, ostentatiously refused to pledge theirs to Giscard. From then on the whole issue hung on the strength of the antiGiscard current among Chirac's voters. Was it — or at the time of writing, is it — strong enough to sweep a sizeable number of them into Mitterrand's arms, or will it abate sufficiently to allow the great bulk of them to seek safety in their normally preferred conservative haven? So far, from Giscard's point of view, the answers have been disturbing. They indicate that at least 10 per cent of the Chirac voters are so irreducibly hostile to him that they will vote for Mitterrand, while nearly half are torn between voting for Mitterrand or abstaining. If anything like that turns out to be the • case next Sunday, then clearly the incumbent President is doomed.
Understandably, therefore, tremendous pressure is being brought on the Gaullist leaders in the last few days of the campaign to come out openly for Giscard. Luscious jobs have been promised. Ministerial posts dangled before their eyes, and even some kind of power-sharing pact envisaged in order to tempt them. As a result, there have been some notable defections to the Giscard side, but there have been significant though lesser ones to Mitterrand too. The ruling body of Chirac's party, however, refuses to commit itself to a decision, and it is easy to see why.
It is not power-sharing which interests Chirac but power. To lend his party's support to Giscard now would be in effect to disarm himself for the future. Its immediate effect would be to demoralise his followers by underestimating the strength of antiGiscard feeling in their ranks. Already in 1974, and when Chaban-Delmas was the official Gaullist candidate and was, like Chirac now, but with a much lower vote, eliminated in the first round, 20 per cent of his voters refused to vote for Giscard in the second. The anti-Giscard feeling among Gaullists, strong then, is even stronger now. This feeling may seem often to be irrational and unreasonable to the point of seeming like nothing more than a gut-reaction, but it is there, and Chirac cannot afford to ignore it.
In a curiously inverse way, Chirac's position in relation to Giscard is similar to that of the Communists in relation to Mitterrand. Just as the Communist leader Marchais has been forced by pressure from below to give his support to Mitterrand, so Chirac by similar pressure has been forced to withhold his from Giscard. Then again, Chirac and his friends feel they can place no faith in Giscard's promises. Here Giscard is paying a heavy price for his deviousness both while Chirac was his Prime Minister and after. Throughout, his conduct was marked by his determination to destroy the Gaullist Party. He piled humiliation upon humiliation on Chirac while he was Prime Minister and afterwards proceeded on a long purge of Gaullists from key positions in the administration. It was a fatal mistake, too, to try to saddle Paris with a nonGaullist mayor when the Gaullists had a majority on the City Council. Having sowed the whirlwind, he is now reaping it. Finally, of course, Chirac has his own fish to fry, and the biggest of them bears a striking resemblance to Giscard. Whoever wins next Sunday it is Chirac who is cast in the role of his successor. Mitterrand has the advantage of providing him with the earliest possible parliamentary election to follow the presidential one, for Mitterrand will have to dissolve the Assembly immediately on winning the Presidency. With Giscard, it would take a little longer.
In either case, Chirac, already in corn mand of the strongest single party in the Assembly, would emerge further strengthened. If Mitterrand wins, Giscard disappears from the political scene, and his rootless party with him. Chirac will then be the sole leader of the opposition, and his role in bringing down Giscard quickly forgiven and forgotten. It is a dazzling prospect built on the not unlikely prospect of Mitterrand making a mess of things. Small wonder that he is widely credited with wishing secretly that Mitterrand wins. But even if Giscard makes it, the same prospect of early election looms, with the same promise of gains in parliamentary seats and the likelihood, too, that Giscard could be toppled early in his second seven-year term. As for the Communists, they are not likely ever to recover from their shattering defeat in the first round, and certainly in the immediate future their role looks like being increasingly marginal. It is somewhat comical, therefore, for Giscard to try and mount a Red scare as he is doing now, just when it sounds most hollow and least convincing. In present circumstances there is something of a trained seal reaction in talk about the danger of 'collectivism' and of France becoming 'the Poland of western Europe'. The French Right have really become a little too spoilt by their long years of dependence on the French Communist Party to keep them eternally in power. It was too good to last for ever, and in fact the Communist Party has been in steady decline in France ever since the War, both relatively and absolutely. It has, for example, singularly failed to profit either from the population increase of ten million or from the five million rise in the number of voters caused by the reduction of the voting age to 18. So all that remains now before Sunday's vote is to scan with incredulity the wide range of support for Mitterrand. It goes literally from far right to far left. Thus, for example, on the far right the founding father of Poujadisme, Pierre Poujade himself, has come out for him. So too has Colonel Passy, De Gaulle's legendary head of his intelligence service in London during the war. So too Madame Marie-France Garaud, both Pompidou's and Chirac's former eminence grise, who was herself a candidate and polled over two per cent.
With an electoral clientele as widespread as that, it is small wonder that Mitterrand, apart from justified suspicion of the stateowned television auspices under which it would be held, was cagey about engaging Giscard in debate.
In fact, Giscard got far the better of the televised debate on Tuesday night. Mitter rand was vague and evasive whereas Giscard was lucid and incisive. Mitterrand's most difficult moment came when he was asked with what majority he proposed to govern; his difficulty was understandable — he could neither hint at Communist support without frightening off potential Gaullists voters nor could he rule it out without offending Communist ones. Meanwhile, it looks as though Giscard is about to wheel on his biggest gun of all — Chirac himself, who is expected to make a last minute declaration in favour of a Giscard reelection. Nobody knows as yet what deal might have been struck between the two men.
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