Center Holds

The crack in France's leftist alliance has turned into a chasm. Last week the Communists announced that in the next few months they would hold 25,000 mass meetings--at a cost of $2 million --to "explain" the sins of the Socialist Party to French voters. Abandoning their earlier strategy of silence about the split, the Socialists are busy turning out books and pamphlets defending their position. Both sides refuse to compromise on the contentious issue of how much of French industry should be nationalized under the common program of a leftist government (TIME, Oct. 10). Declared Socialist Leader null Mitterrand: "Any new concession would be like tossing wood into the conflagration."

The chief beneficiary of the leftist breach is the coalition of center-right parties--which itself is rent by dissension between its two leaders, President Valery Giscard d'Estaing and Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist mayor of Paris. Until mid-September virtually every public opinion poll in France indicated that the leftist alliance would win a majority of the seats in the March 1978 elections. But according to a study by the pro-Socialist weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, the Giscard-Chi-rac coalition would win 246 National Assembly seats to 241 for the Socialists and Communists if elections were held today.

There has been a substantial rise in the popularity of President Giscard d'Estaing, whom many had written off as an ineffectual leader, incapable of uniting the center-right against the left. Another poll --this one by the newspaper Le Quotidien de Paris--showed that Giscard would win 52% of the vote to 48% for Mitterrand in a presidential election. The same poll indicated that Mitterrand would clobber Chirac, 62% to 38%.

Discard's comeback appeared to confirm the wisdom of his election tactic --namely, to stay above the political fray. One reason for his break with Chirac last year was Giscard's refusal to join the Gaullist leader, who then was the country's Premier, in a concerted public assault on the left. Giscard reasoned that attacks would only weld the Communists and Socialists together; if left alone, he calculated, the parties would be torn apart by internal contradictions. His analysis is proving correct.

Chirac has carried on with his aggressive anti-left crusade, charging that the Communists and Socialists were indistinguishable "collectivists." For the moment, he seems to be the big loser in the leftist split. Concedes one of his deputies: "We've been brandishing the Socialist-Communist specter. Now that's not credible any more. We're revising our strategy." Chirac is also seeking to change his image as a hard-lining right-winger. He is barnstorming around France three days a week until the elections, trying to convince voters that he really favors progressive economic and social change.

Giscard and Chirac are united on one point: the need of the center-right parties to lure back "floaters"--voters who have drifted away to support the leftist alliance. The President has left electioneering rhetoric to his fiscal wizard and current premier, Raymond Barre, who has spoken of "enlarging" the center-right alliance and "welcoming new elements." Characteristically, Chirac was more hard-hitting. At an election rally he declared: "To those who left us in good faith and who now feel deceived and abused, I say: 'Come back to us!' " If only a small percentage of French voters abandon the Socialists and return to the fold, they will virtually guarantee the center-right coalition a majority in the National Assembly next March.

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