Scowling Voters

By Frederick Painton

A new challenge to the Continent's leaders

It was supposed to be a political snapshot that just might catch a picture of the grass-roots trends in Western Europe. But the image that developed last week was blurred and distorted, a reflection of a Continent scowling and at odds with itself. Voters from the ten-nation European Community had gone to the polls to elect 434 members of the European Parliament, the largely ineffectual assembly that holds fading hopes of linking national politics to a united Europe. If the 60% turnout was low by European standards, voters could hardly be blamed: the campaign had focused on narrow national issues, largely ignoring the Continent's broader concerns.

Thus the election amounted to a series of national opinion polls that invited voters to criticize those in power without taking the risk of sending them packing. The outcome came as a blow to most of the ten leaders who will meet this week in the French city of Fontainebleau to deal with issues that have condemned the Community to semiparalysis. Said a senior official in Brussels: "Insofar as everyone emerges weaker, it is not good. There are only negative signs."

More ominously, there were symptoms of frustration with politics-as-usual that strengthened extremist parties on both the right and the left. In France, the antiimmigrant, law-and-order National Front, a far-right organization led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former paratrooper, won 11% of the vote. The chief victims in France were the Communists, who have four seats in Socialist President Francois Mitterrand's Cabinet. They dropped to 11.3% of the vote, their lowest showing since 1932 and the most crushing blow in a long decline. In West Germany, it was the surge of the environmentalist, anti-NATO Green Party that shocked the political establishment by winning 8.2% of the vote. In Italy, the Communists for the first time garnered more ballots than any other party, including the Christian Democrats, who have dominated the country's governments since 1945.

The vote did not alter the basic center-right orientation of the Strasbourg-based European Parliament, which is a largely consultative body with some influence but few practical powers. Yet the hints of political polarization pointed toward a period of uncertainty in France and, to a lesser degree, in West Germany. In almost every major country, the election forced governments as well as opposition leaders to reconsider their strategies in the light of what appeared to be a newly volatile and irritated electorate.

The disillusionment arises from a feeling that the Continent is mired in political and economic difficulties for which no solution is in sight. Nearly three decades after its birth, the European Community is far from being the incipient United States of Europe that its founders dreamed of. Instead, it is a loose grouping of countries that bicker interminably over farm budgets and milk prices, customs duties and value-added taxes. Economic growth for Western Europe will average only about 2.5% this year, or just half the U.S. rate. Europeans who in the mid-'70s looked on the U.S. as a nation weakened by Viet Nam, Watergate and economic stagnation now marvel at the fact that Americans have created 13.2 million new jobs in the decade following the first oil shock in 1973, while Europe has lost 1.5 million. Adding to the malaise is Europe's realization that it is losing ground to Japan and other East Asian nations in the competition for world markets. The old Continent's problem has aptly been diagnosed as "Eurosclerosis."

No one in France had expected Mitterrand's Socialist-Communist alliance to survive the elections without some damage. In opinion polls and local elections, the government had steadily been slipping since it came to power in 1981 with an overwhelming legislative majority. No sounding, however, had warned that the Socialists would get a mere 20.8% of the total. Even counting the Communist votes, the left's combined total of 32% could only be interpreted as a stunning rejection of the government.

The largest share of the French vote, nearly 43%, went to the center-right opposition, which was united under the leadership of Simone Veil, a Minister of Health under former President Valery Giscard d'Estaing. Yet, despite the center-right's cries of victory, there was uncertainty over how to deal with the far-right National Front, which shrilly advocates old-fashioned morality and the return of France's 4.45 million immigrants to their countries of origin. The center-right fell well below the magic 50% that would have allowed it to boast that it represented "the real majority" in France.

The collapse of the Communists raised questions about the continued presence in the Cabinet of the four Communist ministers as well as the future of Party Leader Georges Marchais, who has not spoken publicly about the voting results. Marchais's pro-Soviet line has been under fire by some French comrades since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Moscow's crackdown on Poland. The party was further handicapped by its ambivalent role as both a junior partner in the Mitterrand Cabinet and a critic of the government's unpopular economic austerity measures. Said a government official last week: "The Communists' best bet might be to leave the government now. Maybe a round of hard-nosed opposition would help them pull themselves together." In the longer run, Mitterrand may have to change the electoral strategy that brought him to power. To find a parliamentary majority in the difficult 1986 elections, the French President must seek new allies, presumably on the centerleft.

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had more reason than most of his colleagues to be satisfied with the outcome of the election. With 46%, his ruling Christian Democrats lost only 3.2 percentage points compared with their showing in last year's national elections. For a party in power, that was an exceptional performance, especially when compared with that of the opposition Social Democrats, who dropped 3.4% from last year despite a campaign appeal to "send the government a reminder." But Kohl and his ministers had little cause to celebrate: the Free Democratic Party, the small but pivotal junior partner in the governing coalition, took such a beating that it appeared to be threatened with extinction. Responding to the election setback, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher announced that he would step down as leader of the Free Democrats early next year to enable the party to develop "a new image with a new face."

West Germany's new third force now seems to be the Greens. With their strong positions against nuclear power, NATO missiles and environmental pollution, the Greens appear to have taken a substantial number of votes away from the Social Democrats. Said Johannes Rau, the Social Democratic premier of the state of North-Rhine Westphalia: "Our job is to lure our voters back from the Greens and to achieve an absolute majority of our own." If that effort means taking the same position as the Greens on many issues, West German politics will grow even more polarized. Curiously, one of the few people who did not take the environmentalists' success too seriously was Petra Kelly, the U.S.-educated activist who helped found the party. "It was hardly a real gain," she told TIME Correspondent Gary Lee. "In a federal election people would not have been so quick to give the Greens a vote." But as a West German Foreign Ministry official observed, "The Greens have given notice that they are a party with staying power."

In a typically byzantine twist of Italian politics, the Christian Democrats actually celebrated the outcome of an election in which, for the first time, the Communist Party came in ahead, with 33.3%. What pleased the second-place Christian Democrats (33%) was that they had finally arrested their steady decline, slightly increasing their share from an all-time low of 32.4% in last year's national elections. The Communists' narrow victory actually owed much to a wave of popular sympathy following the unexpected death on June 12 of their charismatic leader, Enrico Berlinguer. Exclaimed the party daily L 'Unit`a: A TURNING POINT!

Italy's big loser was Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, whose Socialist Party lost .2% from its 11.4% score in 1983. Craxi in effect had won the Prime Minister's job last Aug. 4 by threatening to force new elections on the reluctant Christian Democrats, who feared a further setback. Now such pressure may not have the same effect: Craxi's days in power could be numbered if the Christian Democrats decide to bring him down. The decline of smaller center groups left the Christian Democrats and the Communists, known in Italy as the "two whales," to continue their long duel for power.

Of all the members of the European Community, Britain produced the lowest turnout at the polls: 32.1%, mainly because of apathy. Both Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives and the Labor Party, which is reviving under the leadership of Neil Kinnock, had reasons for satisfaction. The Tories (41.3%) did better than the opinion polls had forecast, while Labor (36.4%) nearly doubled its representation in the Parliament. The major casualty was the Liberal-Social Democrat Alliance, which garnered 19.5% of the vote but failed to gain a single seat in Strasbourg. Reason: the Thatcher government had rejected proportional representation as practiced on the Continent in favor of Britain's system of electing representatives by districts. Said Liberal Leader David Steel: "It is ironic that the West German Greens and the French National Front have made a breakthrough while the Alliance got 21 1/2 times as many votes as they did."

Blurred though it may be, the political snapshot of the European Community's four major countries may hold some clues to the future: a traditional political stability in Britain and a more peculiar variety in Italy, rising tensions in France, and a slow-motion search for new political patterns in West Germany. Largely ignored but not forgotten in these elections were the frustrating national arguments over money that have stalled the European movement. For that, too, the voters punished their governments. --By Frederick Painton. Reported by William Rademaekers/Bonn and Thomas A. Sancton/Paris, with other bureaus

With reporting by William Rademaekers/Bonn and Thomas A. Sancton/Paris, with other bureaus