The ecological vote
Anthony Mockler
Paris Who wotild ever have believed how deeply candidates for the forthcoming French elections are concerned about good and bad architecture? Hard-headed hommes d'affaires who have made fortunes out of property speculation are now prating about green spaces andcondem ning the goose that laid the concrete eggs. Equally hard-headed members du parti are rolling up their shirt sleeves and parading an unexpected concern for harmony and roses. In fact both the Right and the Left are going all out to woo les Verts -the popular general name for the supporters of the ecological/environmental movement in all its various forms.
Nothing has been more impressive in recent French politics than the totally unexpected rise of the Green movement to a position of almost decisive electoral importance and this is due entirely to the fact that its supporters have decided to contest all and every election themselves. 'Decided' is perhaps too strong: it just, like Topsy, grewed. To recap briefly the various stages: 1974 saw the first apparition in the person of the eccentric but affable Professor Rene Dumont who stood in the presidential elections and won a surprising 1.2 per cent of the votes in the first round.
Two years later in 1976 came the cantonal elections in which the Greens put up an experimental fifteen candidates in the suburbs of Paris and won over 5 per cent of the votes cast where they stood. Much encouraged by this success, they fielded a serious number of candidates 108 in the municipal elections in Paris last year, averaging about 10 per cent of the vote. It seemed that the movement was, if not irresistible, at least snowballing year by year, election by election and the decision was take to put up candidates in this March's parliamentary elections in, hopefully, 150
200 constituencies.
Why did the Greens enter politics at all rather than remain a strong pressure group?
The contrast is enormous between the Friends of the Earth in England, who have never presented their programme to the electorate in any shape or form, and les Arras de la Terre in France who are, at any rate outside Paris, the mainspring of the Green movement and whose leader in Paris, Brice Lalonde, has become rather a recognisable and much-liked figure on French television.
The reason they 'went political' is largely, it seems, because they found that, though they could raise problems, they could never force through satisfactory solutions. Either they were fobbed off with fine phrases and promises, or else they were played off by the various powers-that-be against each other. Hence the decision to try for power themselves that the surprisingly successful results seem to have justified. Even the French, with all their passion for sophisticated politics, welcomed these basically apolitical and idealistic candidates the pleasant successors of the first, ebullient days of May 1968.
It is the French system of voting that gives the Green vote its crucial importance and creates its major problem. For if, as seems probable, the Left wins in the first round on 12 March about 49 per cent of the votes cast ind the Right about 46 per cent, then clearly both sides must do all they can to attract for the decisive second round the 5 per cent that will have gone in the first round to the Greens. Hence the wooing, which would be totally unnecessary in the British system of one-round elections. Hence the • Green movement's indirect influence on the declared policies of all the political parties, hence too their success even if electorally they fail.
But hence also the intrigues and the attempts to split the Green vote, for if the leaders of the Greens instruct their voters after the first round but before the second.to switch their votesen masse to the Right or to the Left, such an instruction could swing the balance and be decisive for the immediate future of France.
This has always been a problem in all the elections that the Greens have fought presidential, Municipal and cantonal but it has never before been so obviously crucial. The result has been, if not fatal for the Green movement, at least potentially disastrous an open split. The united front that the different groups have always managed to put up so far has crumbled, and there will be two different sets of candidates contesting the elections in the Green interest, occasionally against each other.
The first are so to speak the pure Greens who will be putting up about 150 candidates and spokesmen have agreed on total silence after the first round: whatever their personal opinions, they will neither recommend their voters to switch left nor right. The second group calls itself the Front Autogestionnaire pour une Ecologie Socialiste, will be putting up at least 200 candidates and, obviously, instructing its voters to go Left in the second round.
However, this split, though confusing for the voters, is less likely to damage the Green movement than might at first appear. For the Front Autogestionnaire (which unites, besides ecology groups, feminist, non-violent and regional movements) is simply that old haven of the French intellectual Left, the P.S.U., under another name. The P.S.U., thought to be moribund after the departure of its most famous intellectual Rocard to join the reviving socialists, made a failed attempt to unite under its aegis the extreme Left, the Gauchistesand then look the lead last summer in organising with local ecology groups the anti-nuclear power plant demonstrations that brought out so many thousands. Inspired by this the leaders of the P.S.U. decided tbat their future lay in coordinating the new movements that had popular appeal and as a result have condemned Ecologie 78 as being largely backed by the Right.
In any case the P.S.U. will hardly be presenting any candidates under its own traditional initials (and certainly not where the Front Autogestionnaire is standing). As a result the French voter will probably not give this formation more than the usual 1.5 2 per cent that the P.S.U. has normally totalled and Ecologie 78 can hope to garner the 5 per cent or at least 4 per cent of the votes that the latest polls given the Green movement.
And where will these votes go in the second round? My personal impressions is that they are sincerely pro-environmental and will go to whichever of the parties, or indeed of the candidates, is the more convincing in showing genuine rather than theoretical concern for what most worries one in every twenty of the French.
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