France Heading for Trouble -
Ostensibly the crisis which is at present working up in France is due to a dispute over the re-grading of civil servants and the distribution of 30 milliard francs of additional salaries. It is obvious that the Schuman Government, despite its weakness, is capable of settling that quarrel, together with the strike of some 7o,000 Officials which has arisen out of it, without a major political upset. But other and bigger issues are now pressing so heavily on the Government that there is no knowing where the present trouble will end. The existing coalition has no internal strength. It is kept in existence by the opposite pressures of Communists and Gaullists, whose claims to office would be rejected by the mass of French voters in all save the most desperate circumstances. Yet even that is no guarantee against the collapse of the Government if the French Socialist Party continues to indulge its death-wish by weakening the coalition from within. Only last week its Left-wing element, which has never stopped toying with the idea of joint action with the Communists, embarrassed not only the Government but Spcialist Ministers as well, by objecting to the size of the military budget. Since then the Socialist members of the Cabinet have first half-inclined in favour of the strikers and then half-inclined against them. If the Socialists, who have grown steadily weaker in the past few years, really wanted to commit suicide by breaking the coalition which at present props them up, they could hardly hit on a better device than the irrespon- sible meddling in which they have been indulging lately. But all this is no consolation to M. Schuman, who belongs to the M.R.P., or to his Finance Minister, the Radical M. Mayer. They realise what a deluge would follow their -departure. They also realise that their survival depends on their success in holding off the new threat of inflation which has arisen in the past few weeks, and of which the Civil Service dispute is only one phase.
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