The Voters' Warning Shot

EVEN before France's voters went to the polls for this week's final runoff, the hotly contested election for a new National Assembly had already had a powerful impact on French politics. After 15 years of aloof, Olympian and, some would say, arrogant rule, President Georges Pompidou's Gaullists seemed visibly chastened by the surge of the Socialist-Communist opposition in the first-round voting. When the results showed the Gaullists and their allies trailing in the popular vote tally by an expected but still humiliating eight percentage points, government spokesmen began sounding unaccustomed notes of understanding and humility. "The vote of the French is like a warning shot," said Alain Peyrefitte, leader of the Gaullist U.D.R. party, shortly before this week's balloting. "We will know how to interpret their wishes."

A shot indeed. Last week's preliminary vote confirmed the judgment of the polls that Gaullism was in serious trouble. The Gaullists wound up with only 38% of the first-round vote, compared with 46% for the united left.* Though the Gaullists could still emerge from the second round with a majority, it was also possible that they would be forced into a coalition with the centrists, led by Rouen Mayor Jean Lecanuet and Publisher Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, who polled 12.4% last week. Less likely would be the emergence of the first Socialist-Communist majority in France since the 1930s.

Ill-timed. After the first-round results were in, much of France seemed visibly relieved that the Gaullists had survived with no more damage than expected. Shopping picked up in the fashionable boutiques along Paris' Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, ending a slump that had begun with the onset of the campaign two months ago. The strident warnings from the tough-minded Communist leader, Georges Marchais, that "strikes will multiply" if Gaullism continued seemed particularly ill-timed. A walkout of civilian air controllers had snarled air traffic all over France, and was at least partly responsible for the mid-air collision of two Spanish airliners over Nantes last week. One plane crashed, killing all 68 aboard.

French voters knew from past experience that the final outcome would be determined to a considerable degree in eleventh-hour backroom political trading. While they argued, the Gaullists reiterated the theme once stated by Andre Malraux: "There is only us and the Communists." As Party Secretary Peyrefitte elaborated last week, the Communists would eventually dominate the leftist coalition and then do their best to "overthrow the French government and the whole of French society."

With a relatively poor first-round showing, the centrist "reform movement" fell short of establishing itself as a credible non-leftist alternative to Gaullism. Its leaders decided to approach the second round on different tacks. Bargaining for a voice in any new Gaullist government, Lecanuet agreed to withdraw his candidates in districts where they might pull votes away from a Gaullist and thus help to throw the election to a leftist. Servan-Schreiber, hoping that the Gaullists would lose their majority and thus be forced to turn to him and his allies for help, urged centrist candidates to stay in the race.

The leftists had unity problems of their own. Paradoxically, but not surprisingly, the first-round success of the Communists and Socialists bade fair to spoil their second-round chances.

By making deep inroads into such traditional Communist strongholds as the working-class "Red belt" around Paris, Franc,ois Mitterrand's once moribund Socialists surged to within 500,000 votes of the Communists -- and raised a lot of old fears and jealousies. Threatened by the loss of his party's traditional position as the leader of the French left, Communist Marchais stubbornly rejected Mitterrand's proposal that both parties should back the leftist candidates most likely to win -- which in any given district would most likely be the relatively respectable Socialist candidate rather than the Communist.

Marchais insisted on the letter of the united-left agreement: both parties would back the leftist who had led in the first round, whether he had any chance of winning the runoff or not. Explaining his stand, Marchais said that he would brook "no malodorous subterfuge, no bargaining in the wings, no doubtful schemes." Mitterrand? In a television address, he pointedly avoided using the word Communist at all and glumly predicted that "the battle of the second round will be difficult to win."

If the leftists had problems with togetherness, however, the Gaullists had serious shortcomings in basic political perception. French voters may still fear the extreme left, but they are less and less Gaullist. Millions of French voters have not shared in the prosperity of the Gaullist era, and their enthusiasm for major parts of the leftist program -- an increase in the minimum wage, a lower retirement age, better public housing and medical care -- suggests that Pompidou will have to choose not only a new Premier and a reshuffled Cabinet but a new and thoroughly reshuffled set of national priorities, with more emphasis on mundane social needs and less on big business and la gloire

*In the "sjare election" that followed the student-worker demonstrations of 1968, the Gaullists and their allies hit their peak, with 46% of the vote and 359 Assembly seats. Under more "normal" conditions in the last regular election of 1967, they won 43% of the vote and a one-seat majority.

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