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Only the rhetoric remains
Sam White
Paris The Socialist experiment in France has ended and only the rhetoric remains. This will continue to echo for some time yet, but only because, with an assured parliamentary majority and operating under de Gaulle's Constitution, the Socialists need not face the 'voters in a general election for nearly another four years. If the Third or Fourth Republic Con- stitution for which at one time they so hankered had been in force, they would have been dispatched weeks ago and given place, without an election, to a centre-left government. This is what happened to Leon Blum's Popular Front Government in 1936 which lasted eight months. This one has lasted as an effective Socialist government, applying Socialist policies, for a little longer — say 11 months of the 15 that it has been in office — before realities caught up with it and forced it to change course. The ministers may be Socialists with a sprinkling of Communists, but it would be difficult to detect this from the policies they are cur- rently pursuing. These bear less and less resemblance to the socialism a la Francaise promised to the electorate and more and more to Thatcherism a la Francaise. As I said, only the rhetoric remains and this denies that there has been any change in policy. All that has happened, it is explain- ed, is that President Mitterrand with his customary serenity has moved from phase one of his Socialist programme to phase two.
As there has been no change in policy there has been no need to change the Prime Minister, with the result that M Mauro),
Iv who began his term by introducing a '', inflationary policy, is now following '; sternly deflationary one. This retention ei M Mauroy helps, of course, to maintain the illusion that there has been no change. T° have replaced him would have required e/' planation, and this would really have beell, too uncomfortable. All this has put an en' to a guessing game that has been going 0I1 ever since the Socialist victory last year) This concerned how Mitterrand would reac when the going got tough. There were 1bnisde who claimed that the rough going w°11' drive him still further to the Left and therer were others who possibly knew him bette who predicted that in those circumstance: he would do a smart about-turn. answer is now plain for all to see: he 11°' done a smart about-turn. The original gle ble was that there would be an upturn in.t,.0 world economy fairly early in the gPvt-,- ment's life so that France, by reflann.et' would be the first to take advantage °I' „,I1 This gamble failed, leaving behind it a Is; of shocks including two devaluations with j third one threatening and an unpreceden'; wage and price freeze. It has also Mean' sharp drop in the French standard of liVinefo and an end to the indexing of wages p One has difficulty in believing one's ea: now when M Mauroy denounces autorna`a, wage increases to meet price rises as 'a mat jor cause of inflation in France'. Or for th matter when he announces that workers es the basic wage hitherto exempt from taxer will now have to pay them. There are of of pointers culled from the recent speechese the President himself to show that °re Government has moved towards the cton and is now a Socialist-Communist coalin , only in name. For example M Mitterre said recently with refreshing frankness: no socialist programme is not my bible.' 0110 just completed provincial tour thefilA to theme of his speeches has been the riee%0 lighten the burden of social charges "re private enterprise so as to make it m°4competitive. He has also taken to praisink-e Michel Rocard, the chief critic insideear Government of the Government's o:r policies. Another pointer is the shift in P°/,5 tion of M Chevenement, once the 1-e' chief ideologue inside the Government elf onnowthefir firmly establishing a role for hims most echneeraisrhefdinaplribnIcoipwlestocatmhee Socialists;etititilteesst week with the announcement that chareo would be imposed for hospital beds '11,as effort to check the growing and danger deficit in the social security budget. At this point the facade of governmen- tal unity visibly cracked with the Com- munist Minister of Health, M Ralite, openly criticising the measure and the Communist Party's central committee denouncing the 2ernment for 'yielding to pressure from
Right'. The Socialists responded spiritedly by accusing the Communists of Grieing 'selective' in their loyalty to the
ernment. Once again it became a ques- ;len as to how long the union between the ;.Y° could last. The answer to that seems to ue that it has to last at least until the municipal elections next March. The nee between the two already looks like losing between 30 and 40 major municipalities in these elections and will di even more if it goes into battle 'sunited. The Communists will be the chief Il°„sejs in any case, and they are still hoping t oe able to present a common list of can- didates with the Socialists which would ef- fectively mask their own losses. Meanwhile, although there has been a change of policies, the ambiguities still re- „,c'aln. The President has shown a kind of it°,4rage in finally recognising realities, but is the kind of courage that prefers survival bc'e suicide. For the moment the franc has
en steadied by an international bankers' four-billion-dollar loan — an act that sucessfully killed the legend of an interna- tional bankers' conspiracy to skin the socialist franc — but this will be entirely used to replenish the sinking level of France's reserves in foreign currency which have been squandered in two fruitless efforts to stave off devaluation. The actual state of the reserves is now some kind of official secret, but it is reliably estimated that the balance of payments deficit now stands over one billion dollars. In all probability, therefore, France's indebtedness now ex- ceeds its reserves — a dangerous situation indeed. True, the pace of inflation seems to have slowed, but this has little if any significance as the real figures are concealed by the artificial ones produced by the price freeze. The real test for the franc, like the real test for the unity of the Left, will come not before but after the March elections. This latter incidentally is now being put under further strain by the events in Poland, with the Communists falling far short of the Government's 'outright con- demnation' of the ban on Solidarity. Mean- while, the Government will be bracing itself to face not only the harsh realities of the present but to undo some of the damage it did in its first year of office.
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