M. MITTERRAND PREPARES FOR SIEGE
Robert Cottrell explains how
France's President plans to spy on his own ministers
Paris AN ELECTRONIC 'tap' into the code- breaking machinery of the French foreign ministry will, about four weeks from now, enable the text of all confidential diplo- matic telegrams arriving at the Quai d'Orsay to be relayed simultaneously to the headquarters of French government's most dedicated and dangerous adversary. A similar 'tap' into the armed forces' com- munications centre on the Boulevard Saint-Germain will give that same third party access to the military intelligence flowing into the ministry of defence.
Whether the new French government, due to be returned by parliamentary elec- tions on March 21 and 28, will try to halt this traffic remains to be seen. To do so, it will need to show either exquisite tact or brutal lese-majesty, since the electronic eavesdropper will be none other than France's own head of state, President Frangois Mitterrand.
Nobody now doubts that M. Mitterrand Will soon be a politically isolated figure, a socialist president forced to 'cohabit' with a right-wing parliament and prime minister who will be doing their best to bully him into a premature retirement. When a simi- lar confrontation occurred in 1986-8 at the end of M. Mitterrand's first term of office, the President outfaced and outmanoeu- vred the Gaullist Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, then beat M. Chirac in the presi- dential election of 1988.
This time round, however, it is incon- ceivable that the 76-year-old M. Mitter- rand, slower and still haggard from a prostate cancer operation last autumn, will seek a third seven-year mandate in 1995, and opinion polls suggest that France is, in any case, overwhelmingly fed up with him. The Right is forecast to carry some 400-480 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly, a record majority, and the Socialists to be destroyed as a political force for a generation, if not for ever. The prime minister of this next cohabitation will thus be in a much stronger position to test M. Mitterrand's resilience.
The electronic plumbing into the for- eign and defence ministries symbolises the Elysee's readiness for that siege. M. Mit- terrand's first line of attack against the inevitable attempts to marginalise his role will again be to insist upon his ascendancy in matters of foreign affairs and defence, on the grounds that he remains head of state and commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
The counter-attack from the Chirac gov- ernment seven years ago was to starve the Elysee of information in these areas: intel- ligence briefing-notes arrived in heavily expurgated form, and motor-bike messen- gers brought fewer and fewer copies of diplomatic telegrams from the Quai d'Orsay. The experience was a painful one, and M. Mitterrand's insistence on the installation of a new and automatic elec- tronic umbilical cord is designed to deter any attempt at repetition. The diplomatic telegrams and intelligence notes will now arrive directly at the Elysee at the same time as they arrive at foreign and defence ministries, enabling the President, if he so wishes, to thumb his nose at the ministers placed there to challenge his competence in these privileged domains.
Providing his health endures, M. Mitterrand must be expected further to assert his role as head of state by continu- ing to represent France at European Com- munity and other international summits, forcing his prime minister either to stay away altogether, or to find a seat and take his meals among the foreign ministers who fill the number two slots in all other dele- gations. (Protocol officials across Europe will now be bracing themselves for the return of the 'third chair' controversy which dogged EEC summits throughout the last cohabitation. The Quai d'Orsay will insist upon the provision of a third chair at table for the French delegation, whereupon the Elysee will insist equally firmly upon its removal. The host country will squirm politely.) In the more intimate realms of domestic politicking, the French constitution will reserve for M. Mitterrand a useful cache of procedural weapons to defend his interests against the assaults of a hostile parliament. First, it will be his own right, and not that of parliament, to choose a prime minister: so that if he must, in practice, choose a leading figure from the Right, capable of carrying a vote of confidence in the National Assembly, he will be free within that limitation to identify the candidate whom he judges most susceptible to his own charm or wiles, and then to relish the certainty that whoever he does choose will be immediately suspect among the more intransigent Right for having agreed to work with a Socialist president. Such is M. Mitterrand's temperament that many think he will take more satisfaction in dividing a majority against him than in commanding one of his own.
Each week, the new prime minister will then be obliged to channel his business through a Council of Ministers at which M. Mitterrand will both preside and con- trol the agenda. During the more difficult moments of the last cohabitation, M. Mit- terrand brought catalogues from Parisian book-dealers to the table and passed the time annotating his intended acquisitions. If, meanwhile, he occasionally 'forgets' to add to the agenda an item to which the government is particularly attached, then there is very little the prime minister can do about it except fume.
The new government may thus discover that the Elysee is more easily surrounded than subdued; and it will certainly discover that it must contend with being surround- ed itself by a political establishment com- posed of figures appointed or blessed by the President during his 12 years of power. The Elysian stamp is on the directors of the police and the secret services, on the army chiefs of staff, on the most senior civil servants, on the elite ambassadors, on the chairmen of the nationalised indus- tries, on the bosses of the state-run media, and on the dozens of other sensitive (such as running the judiciary) or merely desir- able (running the Louvre) posts in the higher reaches of the State. No loyalty or service is forgotten by M. Mitterrand; and no anecdotal example — the appointment of his dentist, for instance, as ambassador to the Seychelles, or of his doctor as inspector-general of social security — can quite do justice to the range and depth of his capacity to reward.
Naturally enough, the new government will want to send M. Mitterrand's heads rolling, and will probably start, if history is any guide, with the police, the secret ser- vices and the nationalised industries. But each replacement will have to be negotiat- ed with the President, each nomination will have to pass through the Council of Ministers, and soft landings will have to be found for those closest to the presidential affection. The sheer quantity of such pro- ceedings should ensure that at least some of the commanding heights remain in hands friendly to M. Mitterrand for months and years to come.
It would hardly be surprising, in the cir- cumstances, if voices on the Right revived the call made in 1986 by Jacques Domi- nati, a Paris MP, to 'cut off the electricity' at the Elysee and force the President at least physically out of his office. The threat was not wholly rhetorical, since the running costs of the Elysee were and are met by a monthly grant from the prime minister's budget.
M. Mitterrand responded to M. Domi- nati by arranging for the outgoing Socialist government to hand over a lump sum equivalent to the palace budget for the whole of 1986-7, and — sad necessity — depleting the funds left for Prime Minister Chirac's use by a corresponding amount. This time round, M. Mitterrand has secured for himself an even better guaran- tee against blackouts: he has appointed his former chef de cabinet, Gilles Ménage, as chairman of the state electricity monopoly EDF. The Elysee can thus hope to blaze brightly, through the long dark night of cohabitation. But other ministries might do well to stockpile some candles.
Robert Cottrell's book The End of Hong Kong — The Secret Diplomacy of Imperial Retreat will be published next month by John Murray.
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