France: A Precarious Balance

The interminable and overheated campaign for the French legislative election of March 12 and 19 was fought over three stakes. First, it was a test of the hybrid constitutional system set up by Gen. Charles de Gaulle. The popularly elected president has vast powers, but most of them can be exerted only if his prime minister has the support of the National Assembly--if the Executive and the Legislature are controlled by the same party or coalition.

A president faced by a hostile Assembly would have to fight (by dissolving it, or by resigning and running for reelection), at great risk to himself and to the institutions if he should lose. Or else he would have to compromise and accommodate himself to a vastly diminished role. This test has once again been postponed, thanks to the victory of President Valery Giscard d'Estaing's coalition of Gaullists under Jacques Chirac, and of pro-Giscard groups federated in a new party, the Union for French Democracy. After 20 years, the General's regime is still unshaken.

The second stake was the role of the Communist Party (C.P.). It had been in a political ghetto since 1947. In order to come out of it, its strategy, for many years, has been the formation of a Popular Front with the Socialists and the small Left Radicals. The Common Program of 1972 marked the first success of this strategy. But it was signed, not by the old and decrepit Socialist Party of the Fourth Republic, but by a vigorous new Socialist Party taken over by a cunning politician, Francois Mitterrand.

As soon as it became apparent that it might, for the first time since pre-war France, attract more voters than the C.P., the latter appeared less certain of its course. On the one hand, it put ostensible distance between itself and Moscow on a number of key ideological issues (such as pluralism). On the other, it did its best to cut the Socialists down, without visible success.

The breakdown of the Union of the Left last September suggested that the C.P. had decided to push its strategy all the way to power only if the Socialists accepted its terms both for a truly radical program and for the distribution of post-electoral patronage. Should the Socialists refuse (as they did last fall), the C.P. was willing, and indeed seemed to prefer, to destroy the chances of the Left, so as to stay in the opposition where it could hope to become soon again the bigger of the two Left-wing parties.

For a while the polls indicated that the Left might win anyhow. But a sufficiently large fraction of voters who had deserted the Majority in 1974, '76 and '77 for the Socialists, returned to the Right to ensure its victory. They could not bring themselves to support a coalition of bitter enemies engaged in fierce mutual recriminations and incapable of agreeing on a platform. Even though the French youth from 18 to 21 voted for the first time, the Left did a shade worse than in the Mitterrand-Giscard duel of 1974. And so, the C.P. is back in the political ghetto.

Third, what kind of society would emerge as a result of the election? By the Left, the French were offered different yet equally drastic schemes for change. The Communists and the Socialists agreed on the need for greater state control of the economy, and for a massive shift of resources from the wealthy to the poor. The Socialists, in addition, proposed governmental decentralization and steps toward workers' self-management.

The Right offered a long list of piecemeal reforms amounting to a mere embellishment of the status quo. The Left wanted a massive attack on unemployment; the Right denounced this scheme as inflationary and likely to lead to a huge payments crisis. The Left in turn denounced its opponents' indifference to unemployment and inequality. The verdict of the voters was both clear and negative. They failed to endorse the Left's projects for a new society. But the fact that the Majority received only 46 per cent of the first ballot (vs. the Left's 48 per cent) indicates that they had not given it a vote of confidence.

The meaning of the election can be summed up as a series of paradoxes. One, there can be no alternation in power, of the kind that exists in the U.S., in Britain or in West Germany, as long as the French C.P. pursues so sectarian a strategy as to keep a majority of the French from voting for a Left-wing coalition. Unlike the Italian C.P., the French one continues to put the preservation of its own integrity--its electoral base and its hostility to any reformism it could not control--ahead of everything else. It even discards the opportunities for infiltration that gaining power would provide, if such power had to be shared with a larger party.

The victims of this aggressive defensiveness are the Socialists. They emerged from the battle with only a slightly larger electoral base than the C.P., they won fewer new seats than the Communists, their organization is far weaker, the strategy on which they had counted for their return to power as the dominant party of the Left is in ruins thanks to their ally, and they have no promising alternative course. "Objectively," in March 1978 as in May 1968, the French C.P. powerfully helped the regime.

Two, the most important problems faced by France are those which the more statesmanlike Socialist leaders such as Michel Rocard have raised: debureaucratization, the opening up of elite and educational castes, the reorganization of French industry (threatened by outside competition and often kept alive only by state subsidies), a fairer tax and social security system, greater participation by workers in management, and by citizens in local government.

Yet the Socialists have lost their wager on the Union of the Left as well as bungled their attempt to be both a catch-all and a rigorous ideological party. The problems they have stated have to be solved by their opponents, who have failed to do so in the past.

Three, the razor-thin margin of victory confirms President Giscard d'Estaing's intuition about the need above all to enlarge the Majority by a reformist course that would attract voters from the Left, and perhaps even the Socialist Party itself some day. But Chirac opposes this strategy, which, if it succeeded, would dilute Gaullist influence in the Majority; and while the Gaullists no longer dominate it, as they had since 1962, they still have just over half of its seats.

The president's new Union for French Democracy (UDF) is composed of factions whose past enthusiasm for reform has been either nil or purely verbal. The Socialists are unlikely to replace the Union of the Left with an alliance with the UDF: they would split their party if they tried, and they have somber memories of past centrist alliances, which killed the old Socialist party.

Therefore Giscard's conviction that France wants to be governed "in the center" runs against a stark political reality: the French center consists of two incompatible segments--Socialists who want movement above all, and Giscard's conservatives, who crave stability. Their addition would foster not effective government, but confusion and frustration.

Thus, the president's problem remains what it has been even since his election in 1974: how to inject enough reformism into his own Majority, to provoke the "opening to the Left" he desires. This requires two qualities he has not shown so far, despite his analytic intelligence and pedagogic talent: political imagination in devising reforms, political skill in overcoming obstacles. He now has a freer hand and a better opportunity, since he faces a deeply shaken Left and has won much greater influence for his supporters within the Majority.

Stanley Hoffmann, professor of Government, is chairman of the Center for European Studies at Harvard.