Truffles and Flourishes

Down to the wire, four abreast, in a tight campaign

As France's parliamentary election campaign came down to the wire, London bookies were offering 6-to-4 odds against a leftist victory. The franc ticked up in the international money markets, a mini-rally stirred the moribund Paris stock exchange, and President Valery Giscard d'Estaing and Premier Raymond Barre privately predicted a center-right win--by a narrow margin. But the left still led the center-right parties by about 50% to 46% in the latest polls, and there were plainly still some Frenchmen who were ready to resort to the traditional Gallic suitcase defense against the possibility of abrupt political change. Headlines bannered the news last week when French customs officials nabbed Lucien Barriere, president of the gambling casinos in Cannes and Deauville, as he traveled to Switzerland by train with $634,000 in diamonds and other gems in his luggage. The baubles, Barriere explained, were just something for his wife to wear on a skiing holiday in Gstaad.

The only thing that seemed probable as France's 32 million voters prepared to go to the polls on March 12 was that the Socialists, Communists and other leftist parties combined would emerge with a majority of the popular vote. But there was no saying who would win the runoff election a week later on March 19, given the nature of France's two-round election system (see box) and the uncertainty about whether the idiosyncratic French Communists would choose to patch up their differences with the bigger Socialist Party.

On the last lap of the race, the major candidates of the four principal parties campaigned in a variety of styles. Communist Party Chief Georges Marchais, 57, showed up in Villejuif, a suburb in Paris' working-class Red Belt, to greet his fans in a gymnasium plastered with signs saying ENOUGH INJUSTICE! THE RICH MUST PAY! Displaying the bulldog bluntness that has made him the most entertaining of all the candidates, particularly on TV, Marchais inveighed against the "scandalously" rich. "Do you know there are agencies that specialize in the sale of Caribbean islands where you go get a tan in winter?" he asked. "Do you know how much one of these little islands costs? Forty-two million dollars, plus $42 million more in building costs!" Marchais, as French politicians like to do for effect, was using "old franc" figures. The cost in new francs would be $4.2 million.

When the irate murmurs died down, Marchais hit another target: his erstwhile comrade, Socialist Party Leader Franc,ois Mitterrand. "When are we supposed to believe Mitterrand?" he asked rhetorically as boos filled the gym. The Socialist leader, he charged, planned to make a "gift" of $5.7 billion to "giant capitalist companies" in compensation for nationalizing them if he were elected.

In contrast with Marchais, Socialist Mitterrand, 61, comes across as a sober, lugubrious loner--so much so that some have compared his style to Richard Nixon's. He hops from town to town in a Learjet with a small retinue of aides. Stopping in the medieval city of Poitiers, he greeted a long-waiting crowd of 400 without so much as a smile (his advisers have warned him against exposing his notably jagged incisors). He denounced Giscard's Premier as having been "unpatriotic" and "alarmist" by talking to foreign journalists about his views on how a leftist victory might set back France's economy. He then visibly dismayed the local mayor, who is running for parliament on the Socialist ticket, by refusing to predict a Socialist victory in Poitiers. Adding insult to injury, he then turned down proffered glasses of the local wines.

Several stops later on the same day, however, Mitterrand captivated an audience of 2,000 in the town of Angouleme by coming on like a Bible Belt shouter: "Let's end the exploitation of man by man! That's what socialism is all about! All the creeks, all the rivers of history come together in a torrent that is called socialism!" When he had finished his 95-minute performance, his approving listeners rose to sing the Internationale, while the Socialists on the platform each clasped a red rose, their party's symbol.

Raymond Barre's campaign had all the trappings that go with being the sitting Premier, including a press bus, police-escorted motorcades and battalions of attending TV cameramen. Still, the rotund economist, 53, who has never before run for public office, had trouble making contact with voters. Walking through the southwestern town of Libourne, he made valiant efforts at small talk with passersby. Offered a taste of a fine local wine, he pronounced: "I'll drink to anything that will assure the quality of our life." At a local moviehouse, he did his best to answer voters' questions about the status of small shopkeepers' wives and about government pensions, but soon slid into his favorite theme: the soft world economy had inflicted on France all manner of ills that would take the center-right coalition three more years to cure. Pursuing the same point in Bordeaux a few hours later, he scoffed that to gamble on the left's program--more spending, increased nationalization of industry--would be to play "blind man's bluff."

The most effective campaigner for the center-right coalition is Jacques Chirac, 45, the Gaullist leader and Paris mayor. Bouncing out of a Strasbourg hotel at 10 a.m. last week, he shouted to his aides, "Mount your horses!", climbed into a steel-gray Peugeot and led a 15-car caravan on the last leg of what has been a six-month, 30,000-mile-long barnstorming-style campaign all around France. Arriving at 10:30 in the town of Neudorf, he started pumping hands right away and was soon off on a day-long dash that took him to 15 campaign events within a 50-mile radius. In Neudorf, he entered one of the Roman Catholic schools that the left proposes to nationalize--taking care to be photographed under a crucifix. At another town, Chirac nibbled on a piece of truffled sausage encased in piecrust, an Alsatian specialty, before warning his listeners that the left was a "sorcerer's apprentice."

Later Chirac declared that no country had ever gone from a "regime of liberty to a regime of socialism and back again to liberty. I don't say that Monsieur Mitterrand wishes to install a gulag in France," he conceded, but he warned that France under leftist rule would eventually resemble the Soviet-bloc countries. Back in Strasbourg that evening, Chirac delivered another rousing denunciation of the left to 4,500 Gaullist faithful. Sighed one elderly admirer: "He is the dauphin of Charles de Gaulle."

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