The Importance of Elections

For the eighth time in the four years of the Fourth Republic, France was without a cabinet. Foreign representatives at the Big Four conference arrived in Paris this week with no French ministers to receive them. The 1951 budget sat in the Assembly without a leadership to push it through. France, the hope of Western Europe, could barely carry on its routine internal administration.

Premier Rene Pleven, in office for seven months, had resigned after failing to get the parties in his Third Force coalition to agree on a plan to change France's election law. Wrapped up in the electoral issue is the political future of France. Unless the election system is drastically changed, French governments will continue to totter along with weak coalitions of fractional parties facing a solid Communist bloc. The electoral fight boils down to one question: Are the differences between the non-Communist parties greater than the difference between them as a group and the Communists?

"All Very Simple." Since 1946, the French National Assembly has been elected by proportional representation, a system which tends to encourage minority parties, especially those whose strength is widely spread throughout the nation. P.R. is supposed to be in accord with a deep-seated characteristic of the French people. The argument runs that the French are too "logical" to form large, loose political groupings, American style. At least as good an argument can be made that the French are no more logical in politics than any other people, and that the small French parties are the result of rather than the reason for the French electoral laws.

In the Fourth Republic, P.R. has given the Communists a definite advantage. This does not mean that the number of Communists in the Chamber is out of line with the number of Communists in the country. It does mean that P.R. tends to suppress the overriding political fact in France today, i.e., that the fundamental issue lies between the Communists and the nonCommunists. On the surface, the non-Communist parties agree that the election law should be changed so as to diminish Communist strength, but when they get down to cases, each non-Communist party seeks a law that will give it an advantage over the other. The Communists, who want to keep the present law, simply vote with whatever non-Communist group is against any particular new scheme. This has defeated all efforts at reform.

Last week Communist Party Secretary Jacques Duclos cynically summed up France's current crisis. Said he: "It is all very simple. They have agreed to take away our seats in the Assembly. They are in disagreement about how to divide our seats up among themselves."

Party Dilemmas. The Radical Socialists want to return to the two-ballot voting used in the Third Republic. Under this system, if no candidate got an absolute majority on the first ballot, a runoff election was held a week later, in which any combination of parties could elect a single candidate. A flexible center party, the Radicals hope to gain a lot by being able to make deals to their right & left.

The M.R.P., a newer party, while anxious to trim Communist voting strength, is in the same electoral position as the Communists. With its supporters well scattered, it stands to lose heavily if proportional representation is abandoned. M.R.P. Deputies accordingly plumped for a modified single-ballot system, as close to the present P.R. as possible.

Almost every reform proposal put forward by Pleven was hammered to death by the combination of one of these parties and the consistently opposed Communists. When the two-ballot system came before the Assembly's suffrage committee, it was beaten by the Communists and the M.R.P. When a party alliance clause (favorable to the M.R.P.) came up, it was beaten by the Communists and the Radicals.

Irreducible Blocs. After 18 election plans had been cold-shouldered by the committee, Pleven two weeks ago put a last government compromise up for general Assembly debate. The Assembly encouragingly voted for the principle of reform, 327 to 166. Only the Communists dissented. Then the rival parties knocked down twelve plans for implementing it.

Last week the harried, ailing Premier told the Deputies he was willing to accept a single-ballot vote, a runoff election system or even a combination of proportional representation and a majority vote. He warned that proportional representation had bred the self-destructive coalitions of Germany's Weimar Republic. "This lack of power," he rapped, "provoked a crystallization of opinion into two irreducible blocs . . . leaving no result of the whole experiment except that one party was in the government and all the others were in prison . . . We don't want to see that happen here."

The Assembly applauded, but otherwise paid no attention. By Wednesday afternoon the opposing blocs were almost equal. All hope of putting through any plan was gone. Without risking an adverse vote of confidence (which would have forced inclusion of Communists in an all-party caretaker government pending an election under the old law), Pleven quickly resigned.

Through the Revolving Door. Worried President Vincent Auriol, after reluctantly accepting the resignation, rushed conferences with party leaders about forming a new government. Far into Wednesday night, party leaders followed each other through the gates of the Elysee Palace. Cracked Independent Deputy Emmanuel Temple, one of France's best fencers: "It is not enough that they call you away from the salle d'armes in the mornings, but I can't find time to sleep at night." An exasperated M.R.P. Deputy huffed,

"The President says to go fast, fast. He is always saying to go fast."

Candidates for the premiership started a revolving-door traffic the next day. First to try was M.R.P. Leader Georges Bi-dault. He hoped to put through a one-ballot reform system and proposed a sense-making coalition running all the way from the Socialists to the Gaullists. The prospective coalition members balked.

Next on the list was Radical Socialist Veteran Henri Queuille. Queuille, after a little political polling, decided the Radical Socialists were too weak to form a cabinet.

Late Saturday, Auriol turned the job over to Guy Mollet, secretary general of the Socialist Party. Next day, the same politicians who had trekked to Auriol's office on Thursday, Bidault's on Friday, and Queuille's on Saturday, waited on Mollet at his headquarters in the Ministry of the Council of Europe. After several hours of discussion, Mollet cautiously announced that he thought he could form a new cabinet. His plan was to ignore the electoral reform issue, leave it up to the unguided will of the Assembly.

National elections are tentatively scheduled for June. To put through a workable plan by then, at least some Assembly members will have to make a difficult choice between patriotism and their jobs. Unless they do, the new Assembly will be the same confusion of coalescing and conflicting parties as the old. And the Communists will still be in a position to sabotage French internal recovery, defense and foreign policy.

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