Giscard Battles a Slump

By Henry Muller

The President faces a tough re-election fight

Officially, the campaign does not begin until April 10. President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, indeed, has not even told his countrymen whether he intends to try for a second seven-year term. Yet France's presidential election was unmistakably under way last week. With a typically combative statement, Paris Mayor and neo-Gaullist Leader Jacques Chirac, 48, formally announced his candidacy and pledged to halt the "process of degradation" that he blamed on France's present leadership. In the Paris suburb of Creteil ten days earlier, 361 Socialist delegates had gathered in a sports arena to name their 64-year-old leader, Franc,ois Mitterrand, the party's official standardbearer, thus launching Mitterrand's third bid for the Elysee. Not to be outdone, Communist Leader Georges Marchais, 60, who has presidential ambitions of his own, lashed out at Giscard and Mitterrand with equal vigor.

Giscard's ambitions are no secret in Paris, even if his wife Anne-Aymone has tried to build suspense by telling interviewers that his retirement would give the family more time together. What is new is that the President is no longer considered a shoo-in. The Socialist-Communist Alliance's scorching defeat in the 1978 legislative elections, and the ensuing disarray within France's leftist opposition, had given the impression that Giscard could be re-elected without much effort. As recently as November, polls gave him 59% of the vote in a runoff against Mitterrand, a significant improvement over the paper-thin 50.8% majority with which he was elected in 1974. But the latest surveys show Giscard winning only around 30% in the first round, scheduled for April 26, and 50% to 52% in a second-round runoff against Mitterrand, his most likely final opponent.

The President's image has been tarnished not only by the whiff of scandal --to this day he has refused to respond to accusations that he received diamonds from former Central African Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa--but by the deterioration of the aura of technocratic competence that long marked his management of economic and foreign affairs. Unemployment has reached a new record of 1.6 million (6.9%), inflation is galloping along at an intractable 13.6%, and growth is virtually nil.

Giscard has been slow to react to the anti-Soviet mood that developed in France after Moscow's invasion of Afghanistan. Frenchmen still do not understand his surprise meeting with Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev in Warsaw last May. Giscard's failure to act more decisively to prevent the Libyan invasion of Chad last December has eroded much of the credit he won after sending French paratroopers to the threatened Shaba province of Zaire in 1978.

The President has also come under fire for his monarchical style. In fact, Giscard's biggest problem may be that a seven-year term is simply too long, especially in a country in which the President exercises broad authority over aspects of life that range from the price of Metro tickets to nuclear defense. Whatever Giscard's failings, the prospect of a 14-year presidency has generated a combination of lassitude, frustration and second thoughts.

Mitterrand's strategy will be to take advantage of Giscard's weaknesses without calling attention to his own. "We are not under a dictatorship, but no longer quite in a republic," he warned somberly in his kickoff speech before 20,000 faithful at Paris' Porte de Versailles. "We live in a form of disguised monarchy that may no longer be constitutional." But the Socialist leader studiously evades the most awkward question: With whom would he govern, now that the Socialist-Communist Alliance of the '70s is dead? Disingenuously, Mitterrand answers that if elected, he would call for new parliamentary elections and then form a coalition based on whatever majority emerges. He is deliberately vague because he must strike a delicate balance if he is to have any chance of winning. On the one hand, he needs Communist votes, especially in the runoff. On the other, he must appear reassuringly anti-Communist to the tiny but crucial bloc of middle-of-the-road voters who might be wooed away from Giscard.

The Communist Party is not making Mitterrand's task easy. Marchais has recently begun insisting that a Mitterrand government should include Communist ministers, a ploy meant to frighten moderate voters. Paradoxically, as in 1978, France's Moscow-oriented Communist Party feels less threatened by Giscard than by Mitterrand, whose avowed aim is to reduce Communist influence by strengthening the Socialist Party.

Chirac's candidacy, together with that of former Premier and De Gaulle Aide Michel Debre, 69, further complicates the race. Gaullists, who consider Giscard a usurper, will no doubt favor Chirac or Debre in the first round. Giscard's re-election may depend on how many return to the fold in a runoff against Mitterrand.

The incumbent President should be fully capable of reversing his present slump. He remains a master of radio and television, as he demonstrated two weeks ago in a smooth defense of his foreign policy on national television. A Paris Match poll conducted after that performance reflected a momentary gain of several percentage points in Giscard's first-round electoral chances. The President, moreover, is no doubt counting on French voters to follow a time-honored pattern: a brief flirtation with the left in the first ballot, followed by a rush to the center-right when it really counts.

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