THE Socialists who ruled France for five years until their

defeat in the parliamen- tary elections last March promised to transform French society. They have in- deed done so but not quite in the way they originally intended. Elected on a common programme with their erstwhile Commun- ist allies, they have succeed not so much in transforming the social order as in trans- forming themselves. They are now what they originally fiercely denied being, and that is a social democratic party, after the German or British model.

France during those past five years had undergone a kind of cultural counter- revolution which affects both Right and Left, but more especially the Left. There has first been the accelerating decline of the French Communist Party which alone has dramatically changed the political scene. It has robbed the Right of an invaluable bogey and made it easier for the Socialists to present themselves in their true reformist colours.

Hitherto social democrat was a dirty word in French Socialist circles, with only a handful of their leaders, such as Michel Rocard, being prepared to proclaim them- selves as such. Now that they do not have to look apprehensively over the left shoul- der to see what the Communists are up to, the label of social democrat has become an asset rather than a handicap.

Paul Fabra of Le Monde, for example, recalls a conversation he had shortly before the 1981 elections with a leading Socialist who put the Socialist dilemma in these words: "Our problem is that ideologically we are inevitably placed in a situation of inferiority in relation to the Communists. They are in the happy position of being able to carry their views to their logical conclusion. If we agree with them that in principle nationalisations are a good thing,

Socialist co-habitation a la mode

Sam White

how can we then argue that we should limit their scope?' He concluded from this that a social democratic programme is insuffi- cient for France and the Socialists must be seen as being further to the left than that. He concluded: 'The difficulty is how far to go and to explain why we must not go further.'

I do not know the identity of the Socialist Fabra was talking to, but from the evidence at the time it might have been Mitterrand himself. What is certain, however, is that the dilemma which existed then exists no longer. Since then the Socialists have been seeking a new identity and seem to have found it at last in the hitherto despised example of the German social democrats, and even the left wing of the party led by Chevenement has fallen into line. It was at its congress in Bad Godesburg in 1954 that the German social democratic party broke its last links with Marxism by proclaiming its faith in a competitive economy. The French Social- ists have not yet done so nor do they need to do so in the future. They underwent their own Bad Godesburg during their five years in power.

Indeed there are now those within the Socialist Party who argue that even the social democratic concept of the party is out of date and that, given the pivotal role of the presidency under the constitution, the party should transform itself into a democratic party after the American mod- el. All this is a far cry from the heady days of 1981 when the Socialists stormed into power as though they had just taken the Bastille, and class-war slogans were the order of the day. It was then that M. Mitterrand was able to claim that 'for once the sociological majority is also the politic- al one', conveniently overlooking the fact that he owed his own election to Chirac voters who in the second round preferred him to Giscard.

Speaking of Giscard, it is difficult to disagree with his dictum that 'what sepa- rates the liberal Right now from a realist Socialist Party does not justify the political debate being carried on between them in terms of a civil war'. Certainly the massive approval of 'cohabitation' in the public opinion polls confirms this view, trans- forming, as it has done, M. Mitterrand from a highly unpopular president 'detested' is the term used by Le Monde— into a highly popular one. This represents a marked change in the national mood, and anyone who thinks that Giscard's reference to a kind of verbal civil war in the conduct of French politics is exaggerated should ponder the fact that France lived in a condition of latent civil war under the Third, Fourth and the early part of the Fifth Republic, including a period of actual civil war towards the end of the Vichy regime.

These were periods when with alternat- ing intensity the Right, to paraphrase de Gaulle, was alienated from the Republic and the Left from the nation. These were periods too when the extreme Right proc- laimed its preference for Hitler rather than

FRENCH ISSUE

Blum and 40 years later showed by its votes that it hated the liberal in Giscard more than the Socialist in Mitterrand. Viewed in this light the Socialist victory in 1981 was an unmitigated blessing. It gave them unfettered power for the entire five-year life of a parliament, a privilege they could never have hoped to enjoy under pre-de Gaulle constitutions, when the lives of Socialist governments, or any other gov- ernments for that matter, were measured in months rather than years.

Quoting Paul Fabra again: 'What is clear today after the last five years, and the knowledge that the men of the Left have acquired as to the true nature of the crisis, is that no political speech has the least chance of being credible if it does not take into account realities concerning produc- tivity.' It is on that in the last analysis that the entire superstructure of the Welfare State is based.

This recognition of realities, coupled with a posthumous reconciliation with de Gaulle — his constitution, his force de frappe and the fundamental principles underlying his foreign policy — mean that the French Socialists of today are vastly different from the party which won the elections in 1981.

The ideological disarray on the left is matched by a similar disarray on the right. If Marx is dead for the Left, so too are the doctrines of Charles Maurras and those which inspired Petain's Vichy. There was a brief resurrection of them in the late Seventies with the rather sickly flowering of the so-called Nouvelle Droite. The coter- ie of intellectuals composing it, however, was of too feeble a calibre to enjoy an influence much beyond a student fringe.

The decline of the classic Right in France has been masked for the time being by the rise of M. Le Pen's National Front, which, thanks to the introduction of proportional representation by President Mitterrand, won 35 seats in the parliamentary elections last March. Led by an ex-Poujadist, its success resembles that of the Poujadist movement in the early Fifties and is likely to be just as ephemeral.

A return to the old system of two-round constituency voting which the Chirac gov- ernment is about to restore will probably split it in the lifetime of the present parliament and will in any case drastically reduce its parliamentry strength. (1 am writing this as Paris is enduring a wave of Arab terrorism which is bound to revive for the time being M. Le Pen's fortunes.) It should be noted, however, that though the rise of the National Front has been due overwhelmingly to the immigration issue, it is also partly the result of Le Pen's shrewdness in distancing himself from many of the doctrines, such as anti- semitism, of the old-time leaders of the extreme Right in France.

His principal ambition is not to replace the respectable Right but to become part of it. In other words he is not, like his predecessors, an open enemy of the Re- public. In a sense too, he reflects the decline of ideologies in France. What we are witnessing, therefore, is the trans- formation of French politics from a battle- field into something like the civilised de- bate which has been the hallmark of the Anglo-Saxon democracies. Politics have become much less polarised and much less marked by Manichaean notions.

This is of course most strikingly demon- strated by the current highly successful and immensely popular 'cohabitation' between a Socialist President and a conservative, neo-Gaullist Prime Minister. It is an in- novation which has struck a deep response in the country and may well become a pattern for the future. It is highly conceiv- able, for example, in view of the rivalries on the Right that M. Mitterrand may well stand for a second term in the presidential elections in two years' time and be re- elected. If he is, and dissolves the present parliament, the new one elected under the old system is unlikely to provide him with a Socialist majority. In short, it will not be so much M. Mitterrand who will be re-elected as the principle of cohabitation.