A Middle Way for Socialism

By Mayo Mohs

After a year, Mitterrand's government puts water in its wine

It was the sort of political brawl that leaves the opposition smiling. In one corner was liberal Justice Minister Robert Badinter, who had successfully promoted repeal of the death penalty in France last year. In the other was his fellow Socialist, longtime Marseille Mayor Gaston Defferre, who as Interior Minister is the country's top cop. Badinter was urging the National Assembly to abolish a much-hated law, inherited from the government of President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, that increased the police's power to detain, search and even check identity papers almost at will. But Defferre insisted that he wanted "reinforcement of the powers of the police." In the midst of the debate, President Franc,ois Mitterrand dictated the terms of peace. The Giscardian law, he declared, must go. He then ordered up new legislation giving the police similar, if not quite so sweeping, powers.

This week leftist unions and Socialist Party organizations will celebrate the first anniversary of the electoral victory that brought Mitterrand's Socialists and his Communist allies to power for the first time since the '30s. What the celebrators can cheer most honestly is just the sort of shrewd maneuver demonstrated by the President in the police-law dispute: compromise, adding the water of realism to his ideological wine.

Over the past year, Socialist platform planks have been whittled away by practical politics nearly every step of the way. Mitterrand had pledged to reduce compulsory military service from one year to six months, but the move would have increased unemployment. So it was shelved. Mitterrand wanted to impose new corporate taxes and raise social security contributions, but a jarring 10% drop in business investment last year forced the government to postpone $1.8 billion in new levies. Internationally, after signing an agreement to furnish Nicaragua's Sandinista regime with $90 million in defensive arms and after sounding off in favor of El Salvador's guerrillas, Mitterrand and his colleagues talked with the two countries' neighbors--and the U.S. France is now quietly backing off from its initial stance. A once bruited second arms deal with Nicaragua is now unlikely.

The Socialists have, however, kept many of their promises to the poor. Family and welfare allowances have gone up; the minimum wage has risen 20.9%. Reduction of the work week from 40 to 39 hours and the addition of a fifth week of paid annual vacation for most workers have not only lightened the work load but are supposed to be spreading available jobs. Unemployment, nevertheless, broke the 2 million mark last winter and has only recently dropped slightly below that figure. Inflation, which at first dipped to 12%, is inching back up to 14%, even though it is falling in many other countries.

Yet the Socialist regime has been holding its own in most public polls, and Mitterrand's personal prestige scores consistently high in the surveys. IFOP pollsters determined last month that in a presidential runoff, Mitterrand would defeat Giscard 55% to 45%, a better showing than Mitterrand's 52% in 1981. A rather more critical--and realistic--sounding in March, however, went the other way, when voters in cantonal elections across the country gave 215 additional local seats to center-right candidates and also handed them control of 58 of 95 provincial councils.

French business interests, distressed by the Socialists' nationalization program, the initial trend toward taxes and expanded workers' benefits, are relieved by the moderating efforts of Finance Minister Jacques Delors. In the corporate community, notes one Paris-based diplomat, Delors is admired as "a sound, realistic numbers man, the lifeline to reality in a world of Socialist schoolteachers who have never met a payroll." Delors clearly had a part in narrowing the scope of the nationalization program that had been an integral element of the Socialist-Communist platform since 1972. Certain French subsidiaries of large foreign firms, such as ITT and Honeywell Bull, were allowed, for example, to retain their foreign participation. When France's Constitutional Court decreed higher compensation for expropriated assets, the government readily complied.

With similar practicality, the Socialists have abandoned their original plan for a freeze on nuclear power plant construction, pending a national referendum. Six of the nine plants proposed by the Giscard government are under construction--to the immense displeasure of environmentalists who voted for the Socialists. Explains Jean Poperen, a senior party secretary: "We discovered that we could not reduce our oil bill, have 3% growth and stop nuclear power."

Mitterrand takes a long view, assured that he will be President for a full seven years. Touring the Limousin region in south-central France last week, Mitterrand sounded a De Gaulle-like note of destiny. "I will stay until the end of the term to which I was elected," he told one gathering. "I will not do it as a neutral witness to events but as an actor, and a lead actor of the everlastingness of France." Indeed, allows a close confidant, Mitterrand is already thinking in terms of a Socialist presidency lasting for 14 years--long enough "to penetrate French society with the kind of modifications that will be irreversible no matter what comes after--just as Louis XVIII did not try to reverse what Napoleon had done."

But for now, Mitterrand faces a major challenge from people of his own party's stripe: French workers. After a honeymoon period of benign cooperation with the government, unions are becoming increasingly unruly. Last month a walkout disrupted production at the country's two major automobile companies, Renault and Citroen. Laborers at both firms were demanding higher wages and other benefits. Coming from the Socialist President's natural constituency, such unrest should remind Mitterrand that support can never be taken for granted, and that in politics, seven years, not to say 14, is a very long time.

--By Mayo Mohs. Reported by Jordan Bonfante and Sandra Burton/Paris

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante, Sandra Burton/Paris

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