The Right's Narrow Victory

By Jill Smolowe

Rarely had postwar France faced a political sweepstakes fraught with so many unpredictable consequences as it did in Sunday's legislative elections. Up for grabs were 577 National Assembly seats, contested by some 7,000 candidates, who were debating issues that ranged from the future of the country's nationalized industries to ways of solving France's high unemployment. Also at stake was nothing less than the future of the Fifth Republic.

Since the birth of the Republic in 1958, the party of the President has also controlled the legislature. No one was quite certain how a government would operate with a President from one party and the legislature in the hands of another. Yet that appeared the likely outcome. Socialist President Franc,ois Mitterrand's term runs until 1988, but his party seemed destined to lose the parliamentary majority it has enjoyed since 1981. The election was expected to produce a political griffin with the head of a Socialist and the body of a conservative. More unnerving still, the mismatched leftist President and rightist legislature would be expected to embark on cohabitation, as the French say, or living together, until the presidential election, which is now expected in 1988.

France's 35 million voters seemed reluctant, though, to hurl themselves into such uncharted waters. The Socialists, who had been regularly going down to defeat in local and regional elections since 1983, seemed to be picking up votes in the final days of the campaign. Adding to the uncertainty, the election was held against the backdrop of a hostage drama being played out in Beirut, where Shi'ite extremists claimed to have executed one Frenchman and held seven others prisoner.

But despite the terrorist action and the late surge in favor of the Socialists, French voters gave the conservative Union of the Opposition a slim victory. Early returns showed the rightist alliance made up of the neo-Gaullist Rally for the Republic (R.P.R.) and the center-right Union for French Democracy (U.D.F.) winning more than 40% of the vote. That would give them about 290 seats in parliament, just more than the 289 needed for a majority. The Socialists got about 30%, or approximately 210 seats. They will thus remain the biggest single group in parliament.

On the two political extremes, the fringe parties had very different fortunes. The National Front, a far right party that had waged an anti-immigrant campaign, did fairly well, obtaining about 10%, which will give them some 30 seats. On the left, however, the decline of the Communist Party continued. As recently as 1979, the Communists won 20% of the vote in a national election. But this year they got only about 10% of the vote, and will have approximately 30 seats in the new Assembly. They had 44 in the outgoing one.

Now France seems set to begin a historic experiment in power sharing. It is up to Mitterrand to choose within 20 days a Premier who reflects the new right-of-center majority. Since his Socialists ran better than anticipated, the President has a stronger position, but his task will still be difficult. Had the conservatives scored the resounding victory that had been predicted, Mitterrand would have had little choice but to name as Premier Jacques Chirac, 53, the mayor of Paris and the energetic leader of the R.P.R., the largest opposition party. Chirac had made it clear that if he were named Premier, he, not Mitterrand, would determine the government's basic policies.

Mitterrand now has more options. He is expected to show respect for the prevailing conservative trend, but he can find someone in the opposition closer to his own thinking. He might, for example, consider former Premier Jacques Chaban-Delmas, 71, who served as Premier from 1969 to 1972. Another possibility is Simone Veil, 58, a former Health Minister and onetime president of the European Parliament.

After coming to office in 1981 on a wave of popular support, the Socialists were expected to change everything for the better--fast. It was thus inevitable that the public would be disappointed. The government immediately undertook a bold expansionist economic program aimed at speeding up growth. The main result, though, was three devaluations of the franc. In 1982 the government switched to an austerity program that resulted in lower inflation but also a sharp increase in unemployment. While that policy soothed many furrowed brows, the Socialists were stuck with a reputation for erratic leadership.

During the last week of the campaign, candidates stumped the country looking to win a few last votes. On the right, Chirac wrapped up his whirlwind campaign in Paris, where he proclaimed, "It is time to say that [those] who have been governing us do not represent either the values or the history of France and have to go!" The Socialists also trotted out some vote-getting rhetoric. "I promise you, my friends," cried Premier Laurent Fabius, "that if we stay in power, a year from now France will have inflation of 2%--among the lowest rates in the world!" To back that claim, the Socialists produced the most recent monthly inflation figures. They showed that in February consumer prices had actually declined .2%. That was the best inflation report in 20 years. When the Socialists took office, inflation was running at an annual rate of 13.5%.

All the campaign hoopla, though, was partly upstaged by more dramatic doings 2,000 miles away in Lebanon. There, Michel Seurat, 39, a French Middle East researcher who was kidnaped in Beirut last May by the shadowy pro-Iranian Shi'ite-dominated terrorist organization Islamic Jihad, purportedly had been executed as a French spy. The terrorists released three black-and-white photographs that showed a bare-chested Seurat with unfocused, half-closed eyes, a shrouded figure in a closed coffin. Although his body has not yet been found, there appeared to be little hope that he was still alive.

By phone, the terrorists warned that three other French hostages captured last year awaited the same fate unless the French government satisfied their demands by week's end. They included a halt to French arms sales to Iraq in the gulf war against Iran and the release of two Iraqi dissidents whom France had recently expelled to Baghdad, in violation of a long-standing French policy that bars the eviction of aliens to countries where they risk political repression. To complicate matters, a four-man French television crew sent to report on the hostage situation in Beirut was also abducted there two weeks ago. Responsibility for the kidnapings was claimed last week by an unknown group calling itself the Revolutionary Justice Organization.

Thus, in the closing days of a crucial election campaign, France was shaken by a hostage ordeal much like the one that darkened Jimmy Carter's tenure in the White House. In that case, fanatics in Iran held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, and all but sealed Carter's defeat in the 1980 U.S. presidential contest. It will probably be weeks before pollsters can sort out what impact the crisis might have had on Sunday's voting.

In an impressive display of unity, government ministers and opposition leaders refused to let the terrorist gambit become a campaign issue. Premier Fabius announced that France would "not give in to blackmail," while Chirac declared that "all of France feels solidarity and horror in facing [such] bestial acts." Criticism by members of the hostages' families, however, was scathing. In an emotional Beirut press conference, Michel Seurat's Lebanese wife Mary bitterly charged that government mismanagement had caused her husband "to be assassinated."

Even after the parliamentary elections, French voters will not get much relief from political speeches. Since the presidential contest is just two years off, the recent barnstorming was in many ways a dry run. The politicians who dominated this election are likely to lead in the 1988 race. On the right, Chirac has barely held his presidential aspirations in check. Giscard is also expected to make another run for the roses. Both will have to wage an upward campaign against former Premier Raymond Barre, 61, who regularly tops the polls as France's most popular politician. The Socialist stable is also rilling rapidly, but the front runner is Mitterrand.

In the meantime, the left and right will have to get along better in the future than they have in the past. There are signs that that may be possible. Perhaps the most important development of the parliamentary campaign was an evolving sense that the country's historic left-right dichotomy, which dates back to the French Revolution in 1789, is gradually fading in the face of an emerging national consensus. If both sides can learn to walk gingerly along that common ground, political life in France will have entered a new era. --By Jill Smolowe. Reported by Jordan Bonfante and Adam Zagorin/Paris

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante, Adam Zagorin/Paris