Mitterrand: On the Road to Leftist Union

MORE political epitaphs have been written for Socialist Francois Maurice Mitterrand in France than for Richard Nixon in the U.S. His current allies, the Communists, once dismissed him as a fascist. The Gaullists have described him as a covert Bolshevik, a shifty opportunist and a Machiavellian operator.

Mitterrand, 56, has been in and out of eleven Cabinet posts and has lost one parliamentary election since his entry into the bear pit of French politics in 1946. Yet in the presidential election of 1965 he amassed an extraordinary 45% of the popular vote, against none other than Charles de Gaulle. If last week's newspaper polls prove right, he could well become France's Premier in 1973. This feat, if Mitterrand brings it off, will bear witness to his tenacity, shrewdness and gift for political compromise. Mitterrand has had to painstakingly rebuild the flagging Socialist Party, which has long been threatened by minute doctrinal squabbles as well as by Gaullist and Communist inroads upon its petit bourgeois constituency. Most French socialist leaders have traditionally refused to collaborate with the Communists on ideological grounds. Mitterrand's tactic, since he took over as leader of a regrouped Socialist Party in 1971, has been to fashion a united front with them. He calculates that France's Communist Party--which, though it has only 400,000 to 500,000 card-carrying members, draws as many as 5,000,000 votes at the polls--will provide the weight needed to tip the electoral scale in his favor this year.

Besides his organizational skills, Mitterrand has developed a unique campaign style--at once highbrow and low key--that is singularly effective in both entertaining intellectuals and persuading workers. His weapons are wit and irony. Referring to Pompidou's imperious ways with the National Assembly, he remarked recently: "Just because the President was elected for seven years in 1969, does he expect the French people to stand rigidly at attention the whole time?" In another speech, Mitterrand acidulously expressed his hope that if the leftist coalition wins, Pompidou will not act like "a maiden with the vapors" when "he finds himself in a democratic country again."

Paradoxically, Mitterrand comes from a conservative Roman Catholic background, and concedes that "my socialism did not come easily." One of eight children of a railway worker from the southwestern province of Charente, Mitterrand says that in his youth "we talked about Communists as if they were men from Mars." When reproached for his "reactionary past," he replies: "I deem it more honorable to have evolved from right to left than vice versa." In spite of his impoverished beginnings, Mitterrand has gathered degrees in law and political science.

During World War II he was injured while serving near Verdun as an infantry sergeant. Captured by the Nazis, he eventually escaped from his P.O.W. camp and joined the Free French in London. Although De Gaulle named him junior minister in his first Cabinet in 1944, Mitterrand soon became a fierce critic of the general's policies.

Mitterrand's mode of life is oddly un-French. He cares little about food, does not smoke or drink hard liquor, indulging only in a glass or two of red wine at meals. He and his wife Danielle have two sons who are in their 20s. His dark conservative suits make him look more like a corporate executive than a zealous radical who proposes to nationalize France's "strategic industries."

Even his political enemies--and they are many--concede his resilience and his flashes of brilliance. In the judgment of the Paris daily L'Aurore: "Among the political figures of his generation there is no doubt that Mitterrand has endured the most ferocious attacks, the most violent personal insults. His response to all his enemies shows a vivacity of language and spirit that are the mark of a great talent."

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