Fateful Elections

The Western democracies waited anxiously for France to go to the polls next Sunday. France is the keystone of Western European defense; no NATO plans make any sense before it is clear what kind of government France will have after the elections (see INTERNATIONAL). The people who seemed least concerned with the crucial electoral battle were the French voters themselves. Throughout the country, mayors issued proclamations urging Frenchmen to vote. Said one: "You think that nothing will change . . . But you must vote . . ."

Would anything change?

No party in France has a clear national aim; the Communists do have a clear aim --but it is not national, it is the aim dictated by Moscow. The various parties are divided on specific issues, many of them important; but no party seems to have an overall program capable of coaxing the French voter out of his rut.

This is the French party lineup:

Communist Party, bossed by shrewd, tubby Jacques Duclos, 54, who took over when Top Red Maurice Thorez, 51, suffered a stroke last fall and went to Moscow for treatment. The Communists campaigned against the U.S., NATO, rearmament, inflation. In the last Assembly, the Communists held 167 seats out of 621, more than any other party.

Rally of the French People (R.P.F.), allied with a number of small right-wing parties, the party of General Charles de Gaulle, 60, haughty, magnetic symbol of French wartime Resistance. His platform comes closest to a national program: a strong government and army, a strong France that would swing more weight in the Atlantic pact. Cried De Gaulle in Paris last week: "Rally around me! The responsibility which history imposed upon me yesterday to save the nation from the abyss today commands me to intervene directly to show the way and lead the nation." De Gaulle, say his critics, has not made specifically clear, however, where he wants to lead the nation.

Third Force, boxed between the Communists and Gaullists, the coalition of Socialists, Radicals (and affiliated groups) and Catholic Popular Republicans (M.R.P.) that has dragged along rather than governed France since 1947. Leading lights: Henri Queuille (Radical), 66, quiet, able, onetime doctor who managed to stay Premier for 13 months, longer than anyone else in the Fourth Republic; Robert Schuman (M.R.P.), 64, ex-Foreign Minister, statesmanlike advocate of reconciliation with Germany, author of the Schuman Plan. The Third Force platform: defense of the Republic and antiCommunism, but all in moderation.

Slight Improvement? The only thing that holds the Third Force together is a distaste for the political extremes of right and left; on many vital domestic issues, the Third Force has no common program at all. Realizing that unless they stuck together they would be cut to ribbons by the Communists and Gaullists, the Third Force parties got through Parliament a new electoral law (substituting for the old proportional representation system), which they hope will favor them at the expense of the right and left (TIME, April 16).

This is how the system works: the Third Force groups form an alliance, i.e., when it comes to counting votes, they are considered as a single party. Whichever party wins 50% of the votes automatically gets all the parliamentary seats for its district. Individually, the component factions of the Third Force could never hope to get more votes than the Communists or Gaullists; but taken together, they have a chance to outnumber them.

If the Third Force coalition gains a majority in Parliament, there will still be no guarantee that France will be more united than in the past; if De Gaulle does well, he might split the M.R.P. or the Radicals away from the Third Force and form a coalition government with them, but that might drive the Socialists into the arms of the Communists. The Reds are not likely to let De Gaulle take office without making serious trouble. The Communists, Western observers believe, have no chance of winning a majority in the Assembly, but lesser gains could hurt France, make her even less stable than before.

France's lack of a stable national government is one of the political calamities of modern Europe. There is no ground for hope that the elections will bring a drastic change for the better. The West's best hope: a slight improvement.

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