NEWS OF THE WEEK
FEW municipal elections can have brought to a focus so many national and even international issues as those which are to take place in France this week-end. Local questions at these elections have in the first place been overshadowed by the first venture of General de Gaulle into party politics at the head of his Rassernble- ment du Peuple Francais. Despite the fact that the General's speech in Algiers on Sunday produced nothing which could be called a detailed policy, the theory that the R.P.F. is not a party at all no longer holds water. The Communists, who with the R.P.F. dominate the hustings if not the minds and the votes of the electorate, are certainly accepting no such theory, except to the extent of vilifying their opponents not as one party but as a combination of all the forces of Right Wing reaction. Nor does the struggle end in talk. The threats of the Communists to use their domination of the C.G.T. (the French T.U.C.) to support demands for higher wages, frustrate the Government's efforts at retrenchment and sabotage the Marshall Plan, must be taken seriously. In fact the battle has already been joined in the transport strike in Paris and could easily spread throughout France. The Government, which after all sympathises with neither extreme, has done what it can to arrest the threatening upward spiral of inflation by proposing measures to balance the budget and cut down capital expenditure, but M. Ramadier must know that these gestures make little difference now. The ripples of the disturbance in France spread out to Washington and Moscow. M. Bidault has returned from his American visit, followed by a promise of $220,000,000 in stop-gap aid to relieve France's desperate economic plight—aid which must have been prompted at least in part by an American realisation of Europe's political danger if the Fourth Republic were to collapse. And at the other end of the scale, the beginning of the Cominform, with the French Communist Party among its members, has been followed by a sudden and favourable Russian reply to the French request, made last August and several times since, for discussions on the supply of Russian grain. If this patico-economic imbroglio is sorted out peacefully there will be a sfgh of relief throughout Europe.
