Mitterrand: a flawed triumph
Sam White
Paris The scale of the Socialist victory in the French General Election following its victory in the Presidential one is now on such a scale that it even has some of the Socialist leaders worried. Not only does it remove any alibi for a scaling down of some of the more extravagant promises or even for caution, but the very size of the absolute majority held by the Socialists alone will encourage the kind of factionalism to which Socialist parties are heir. There are already four more or less distinct tendencies within the French Socialist Party of which the far Marxist Left, the CERES group, represents about 12 per cent of the newly elected Socialist deputies. Now Mitterrand has decided to extend this majority to include the Communists by bringing them into the Government.
They will add yet another faction — and this time a highly disciplined one — to an already faction-ridden majority. Mitterrand's decision to bring them in, eagerly backed by the CERES group, is apuzzling one, seemingly largely symbolic for they are needed neither as ballast nor as hostages.
Their support for the time being anyway was assured with or without ministerial posts. Their surrender to the Socialists after their poor showing in the first round of the Presidential elections was unconditional. Their presence in the Government changes nothing: they will stay with the ship as long as it suits them and desert when it suits them. Disarmed for the time being politically, they are also disarmed industrially. Their trade union arm the CGT will behave itself not so much because Communists are in the Government, but because it is in too weakened a state to do otherwise.
Mitterrand should know, and no doubt does know, if only from his own most recent experience, that agreements with the Communists are not worth the paper they are written on. In any case, on the terms that are at present being negotiated with them for their eventual entry into the Government, there is nothing that they cannot put a reasonably good face on. Thus, on the issue of Government solidarity and the Government's domestic programme, no problems need arise. The foreign issues are trickier but present no insuperable difficulties. They have already committed themselves to support of France's existing alliances and the Common Market, and that leaves only Afghanistan, Poland and the Soviet SS-20 missiles. On the latter, they support the idea that these should be reduced in the context of general disarmament negotiations, on Poland they are already declared opponents of Soviet intervention, and on Afghanistan, without contradicting their previous stand in favour of the Soviet invasion, they can join in the call for a negotiated Soviet withdrawal. They can bow the knee to all these concessions as they have already bowed the knee to Mitterrand in giving him their full support both in the final round of the Presidential elections and in the Parliamentary ones.
Indeed, if there is any hard swallowing to be done, it will be on the Socialist side, not the Communist one. They will have to face the fact that in letting the Communists in, they will be disappointing many of their own supporters who thought that by giving them an absolute majority they were effectively preventing the need for Communist participation, not paving the way for it, and they will have to face the international consequences of such participation. For the past few weeks, the Foreign Minister, M Cheysson, and M Mitterrand himself, have been heavily engaged in reassuring Washington, Bonn and the Gulf States as to the new French Government's intentions, only to undermine this newly won confidence by including Communists in the Government. The question therefore arises why, .in view of the disadvantages and the lack of any real need to do so, Mitterrand is bent on having -Communist ministers?
The answer seems to be that he is continuing the long-term strategy which he first forged with the union with the Communists ten years ago. He has already succeeded in largely marginalising the French Communist Party and he wants to carry the process still further. To him, the Communists are not just a party but an important working class segment of the nation which must be reintegrated into it. To bar them now, when the Socialists are strong and they are weak, is the best way of ensuring their revival. He wants no enemies on the Left, and the best time to make overtures to the Communists is not when they are strong but when they are weak. This is the gamble, and having won his first one — that of reducing the Communists to a junior role in the working class movement — who is to say that Mitterrand will not win the second?
All this indicates that, whatever else the Mitterrand experiment will turn out to be, it will not follow the pattern of a banal Social-Democratic one along West German and former British lines. It will involve France in profound social changes of a kind that will have their effects throughout Europe. Although his success was only made possible first by the split within the former majority and then by the dramatic drop in the Communist vote, the underlying reasons for it are much more profound. They are, ironically enough, largely due to the success of previous regimes, beginning with that of De Gaulle in carrying out France's second industrial revolution and transforming it into the world's fourth most important trading nation. This has produced a huge wage-earning and salaried class which has found it increasingly difficult to identify itself with the neo-conservatism of its rulers. This sociological change has transformed voting habits throughout the country, giving the Socialists heavy majorities in, for example, such former 'backward' regions as Brittany and Alsace-Lorraine. It 15 a change which De Gaulle vaguely but strongly felt, hence his championship of what he called `participation' and regionalisation, notions which his conservative successors derided. The final irony, of course, is that the Left now owes its almost unlimited powers to the Constitution created by De Gaulle and which it fiercelY opposed for many years. We are, one feels, on the edge of exciting times, in which once again France will play the role of the great innovator.
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