France Center Stage

By Pico Iyer

THE OPPOSITION TRIUMPHS! crowed the headlines of the antigovernment Paris daily Le Quotidien de Paris. The assessment was a shade presumptuous, perhaps, and a trifle premature, but not entirely misleading. In last week's elections for general councilors in roughly half of France's 3,848 cantons, or voting districts, not only had the conservative opposition won and the ruling Socialists lost, but the far right had won big and the far left had lost badly. In all, the established conservative coalition claimed 49% of the votes, while the maverick, ultrarightist National Front party scored an impressive 8.7%. By contrast, the combined forces of the Communists and the Socialists won only 41% of the ballots, with the Communists losing almost half the number of seats they had taken in comparable elections six years ago.

The cantonal elections are not crucial in themselves, and at week's end runoffs still had to be decided through a second round of voting in almost two-thirds of the districts. Nonetheless, the last bout of nationwide voting before the all important parliamentary elections next March was scrutinized on both left and right as a barometer of the national mood and an augury of things to come. President Francois Mitterrand's Socialists, though rebuffed, could gain some solace from the fact that their steady decline since 1982 might have leveled off. For its part, the right, though victorious, was made distinctly uneasy by the success of the renegade Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose National Front sounded a belligerent anti-immigration alarm to win support among disaffected workers in the industrial urban centers of the south.

The message to the Socialists seems to be that survival in next year's elections depends, for the most part, on reclaiming the center. Perhaps their best hope in that effort lies with Premier Laurent Fabius. Over the course of his eight months in office, Fabius, 38, France's youngest head of government since Duc Decazes in 1819, has been working to give Mitterrand's government a snappy new image. He has, in fact, become the very embodiment of the government's passage from socialist idealism to managerial pragmatism. During his regularly televised fireside chats, he confidently predicts economic improvement with the help of four-color graphics on his French-made Bull MICRAL personal computer; more broadly, he has launched a nationwide campaign of "modernization" that ranges from an industrial restructuring plan to the installation of computer learning centers in 36,000 French towns. No matter that the dashing Premier often looks more like a corporate financial director than a Socialist political leader. "Fabius," says a party elder, "represents the Socialists' will to survive." According to the latest SOFRES poll, he is doing just that: 55% of the public approve of the Premier's performance, as against only 41% for Mitterrand's.

Fabius, however, is more than just a youthful face. He has stuck by the government's three-year-old austerity policy and so presided over the beginnings of an economic recovery. Inflation was down to 6.7% by the end of 1984, less than half what it was at the end of 1981; the country's trade deficit shrank from $10 billion in 1982 to $2 billion in 1984; and corporate profits were up more than 15% last year from a year earlier. One black mark remains: a steadily rising unemployment rate that reached 10.4% last January, up from 9.1% a year ago. But that problem too has been met with typical pragmatism: Fabius is at present pushing for an ambitious $1 billion scheme that would keep laid-off workers on company rosters for a year while they were being retrained. Apart from its economic merits, the plan would serve the political purpose of effectively freezing unemployment levels until after next year's elections.

The son of a wealthy Parisian antiques dealer, Fabius received his education at the elite Ecole Normale Superieure and the Ecole Nationale d'Administration. He first became an active Socialist while working as a high- level civil servant in 1974 and quickly came to the attention of then Opposition Leader Mitterrand, who eventually made him his chief of staff. After Mitterrand became President in 1981, he made Fabius his Budget Minister, then Industry Minister. An unwavering Mitterrand loyalist, Fabius has said that "there is not a cigarette paper's worth of difference between our views."

Not everyone is convinced by such claims. "Laurent Fabius is a man of fashion," charges Jacques Toubon, secretary-general of the neo-Gaullist Rassemblement pour la Republique. "When it is fashionable to be Socialist, that's what he is. When it is fashionable to be a free-marketeer, that's what he is. No character. No conviction." Some of the Premier's colleagues charge that he cozies up too much to Big Business, others that he exercises his pragmatism at the expense of Socialist ideals. "Fabius is always a manager first and an ideologue last, which is good up to a point," says a former Cabinet official. "But if there is no ideology left at all, then it is hardly worth it." Many, however, believe that the Premier's freedom from textbook orthodoxy will ultimately prove to be his saving grace. "Fabius does not wake up every morning and rush to read the Socialist gospel," says Francois Lagrange, a senior policy adviser. "He worries about solving the problems of France on the ground." That, as the Socialists know all too well, is where next year's elections will be decided.

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante/Paris