A post-Socialist President?
Sam White
Paris I am not sure whether it was Machiavelli or Francois Mitterrand who coined the adage that in politics one chooses one's i enemies but not one's allies. Certainly in his long career M. Mitterrand has not been too drosy about picking up allies on the rosy fringes of French political life when it suited his immediate interests, and lIs this, among other gifts, which led the ate Francois Mauriac to Nickname him the Florentine'. These reflections surfaced when the Left raised a great outcry over the last minute alliance between the conservative opposi- non and the extreme Right National Front in the recent municipal by-election at Dreux to ensure that the city was lost to the
ocialists. It was so lost, and in convincing fashion, the combined Socialist-
ortiintinist vote having dropped five per cent since the municipal elections last March and a further five per cent on the laFesuall lts of the 1981 general election. It would
.
out Probability have been lost even an alliance between the opposition and the extreme Right, but as the latter, ,ored
running on an anti-immigration programme In a city where one in four is an immigrant,
sc a freakish 17 per cent of the vote in the first round — its normal vote in the rest of the country is rarely above one per cent It; it was deemed prudent in this case to rg e one to make certain of winning in the final vote, It was a dubious deal to make, both dirrally and politically, for it meant rewar- aIng the National Front with four seats on we the Dreux city council, as well as incurrin gg °churn of having it as a partner. But it Port no different in essence from the sup- , that M. Mitterrand readily accepted 1noth that self-same extreme Right in the ,1'
"65 presidential elections when he stood against de Gaulle. In that
_It!ght Year the candidate of the extreme uger-Vignancourt, was the exceptionally odious Maitre who hated de Gaulle more than he hated Communists, Socialists aside jienws c°mbined. He obligingly stood the second round and advisehis didate to VOte for Mitterrand, theean- _chi:late of the united Left. Asked whether he _accepted support from such a source, Mit- terrand. replied: 'I accept support from I:ePuhlicans opposed to personal power. IvIon t ask me to pick and choose among my Aortners'' Oa a different level, Raymond it '41 Posed a more pertinent question: was _ rnore dangerous, he asked, to have four emienihers of the extreme Right on a provin- ,,a1 cItY council than it was to have four \--onimunists in the government? Meanwhile, there were clearly compensa-
tions both for the Socialists and the Presi- dent in the manner of their defeat at Dreux, and they promptly began to make the most of them. The menace of fascism was of course abroad in the land, and all the old anti-fascist slogans of the Thirties were hastily brushed up again and paraded with all the fervour of a religious revival. Solemn editorials were written and lectures delivered on television pointing out the sup- posed parallel between events at Dreux and those that preceded the Hitler take-over in Germany.
There too, it was pointed out with great acuity, Hitler had come to power on the shoulders of the respectable Right. It was enough to make Jean-Marie le Pen, the leader of the National Front, who looks like an aging chorus-boy, swoon with dreams of glory. For President Mitterrand, however, the happening at Dreux opened up more serious possibilities than those in- volved in evocations of the past, and he stayed aloof from the Dreux debate. What must have given him satisfaction in what was otherwise a wholly unsatisfactory result was that Dreux produced a split in the op- position, with some of its most notable figures, like Simone Veil and Chaban- Delmas, with whom he has close personal links, condemning the opportunistic alliance with the extreme Right. There, it must have seemed to him, were lining up
the kind of reinforcements he would need if his projected move towards a Centre-Left government were to become credible. These are the kind of people with whom he could `co-exist' as President in the almost certain event of the Left losing the next parliamen- tary elections in two and a half years' time, or possibly even earlier. The problem of what would happen then, with the presiden- tial term still having two years to go, is now the subject of hot debate in Paris. Some, like Raymond Barre, say that if his party were defeated the President would have to go. Others, like Jacques Chirac, claim he could stay. Clearly, with possible rein- forcements like Mme Veil in the offing, he would be more likely to stay than to go.
Equally clearly, the President himself, to the dismay of many Socialists, is moving steadily to the Right. In his latest television performance, which incidentally was by far his best, he dropped all the old Socialist shibboleths and instead extolled the profit motive, declaring the class war to be dead. He disarmed his critics by agreeing that the present level of taxation was 'intolerable' and promised to reduce it by 1985 — that is, a year before elections are due. Meanwhile the President's popularity rating in the polls continues to fall like that of a barometer heralding storms and now, after a brief im- provement following the dispatch of troops to Chad, has dropped again to the lowest rating — only 33 per cent satisfied — of any President under the Fifth Republic. This is so narrow a consensus that it gives rise to understandable alarm regarding the immediate future. The new taxes hit the middle classes especially heavily and these, combined with higher local rates and social charges, now make France the highest- taxed country in Western Europe with the exception of a couple of Scandinavian ones. There is a haunting fear at the moment that this might produce a new type of Poujadist protest in the shape of an organised refusal to pay taxes. Similarly, there are fears on the industrial front of lay-offs and strikes over the government's decision to hold down wage increases to only half of what the unions might have expected.
Paris's buoyant Bourse is only buoyant because the rich are investing in national- ised industries as against tax rebates, and also because some of them are dollar earners. True, France's trade deficit has been greatly reduced, but then so it should be after three devaluations and a sharp drop in domestic purchasing power. Apart from arms, one does not know to what ex- tent French exports have contributed to the fall in the deficit. In any case, the size of the deficit continues to dominate much of French diplomacy. This is why, for exam- ple, France refused to join in the air boycott of the Soviet Union, and why it decided to lend five Super-Etendards equipped with Ex- ocet Missiles to Iraq to help it in its war with Iran. The project is going ahead — despite British and American protests — but its purpose all along was clear, to prop up a regime which owed the French too much money.
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