Socialist
Party tries hard to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory
IF THE RULES of boxing applied to politics, François Mitterrand and the
Socialist Party leadership could be prosecuted. They are doing their best to throw the legislative elections.
On TV the day after the first round in the legislative elections, viewers could see the unusual spectacle of Socialist
Party representative Claude Estier proclaiming that it was a good thing that his party suffered a relative defeat
- because too large a victory for the
SP could have complicated collaboration with the other forces in parliament, that is, the bourgeois parties!
GERRY FOLEY
T
HREE SURPRISES emerged
The presidential-majority vote was from the first round of the thus about three percentage points legislative elections. First, the higher than Mitterrand's score in the first round of the presidential elecabstention rate of 34.3% was the highest in the history of the Fifth tions. But in these elections the polari-
Republic, if not since the Liberation.
zation was already more advanced
Second, the Socialist Party and its althan in the first presidential vote, in lies did substantially worse than exwhich the far left got 4.5%.
pected. Third, the Communist Party
The united slate of the right, the Union du Rassemblement et du Centre vote rose sharply, to 11.27%, as compared to 6.78% in the presidential
(URC) got 40.7%, as against 36.48% elections and 9.8% in the last legislafor Chirac and Barre, the candidates tive elections in 1986.
of its two components in the first pres-
In all, the presidential-majority slate idential vote. So the right's gain in got 37.4%, exactly the same as the comparison to its first-round perforcombined vote of the SP and its Left mance in the presidential elections
Radical allies in the 1981 legislative was about the same as that of the preselections. The vote for the SP as such idential-majority.
was 34.81%, and another 1.53% was
The National Front (NF) vote fell cast for non-SP candidates on the by about a third from the presidential presidential-majority Lists.
elections, from 14.39% to 9.71%, al-
FRANCE most exactly the same as its score in the 1986 legislative elections. The ultra-right racist party clearly suffered from the parliamentary right closing ranks and its touchiness about alliances with Le Pen after the alarm over the NF vote in the previous elections. The first-past-the post system reintroduced by the previous right-wing government may cost it all, or nearly all of its parliamentary representation.
National Front remains a force in French politics
Despite the sharp drop in the NF vote, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR, French section of the Fourth International) stressed in its communiqué on the elections that the neo-fascistic party's results confirmed it as a force in French politics. Moreover, the NF is not strictly an electoral party, and to some extent it may be able to use its exclusion from the national assembly to reinforce its "antiestablishment image." What is more, 7 June 13, 1988 • #143 International Viewpoint
----- photo credits and running heads -----
Illustration: Car! Flint FLINT
FRANCE in a National Front out of parliament, the more fascistic activist groups within it could have a freer rein.
Despite its setback countrywide, the National Front largely maintained its position in France's second largest city, Marseilles. Le Pen himself ran in a local constituency and slightly improved on his presidential vote, although he trailed far behind his SP rival, Marius Masse (about 32% to about 37%). In five districts out of eight, NF candidates came in ahead of the URC.
Le Pen has made clear his intention to capture the mayoralty of Marseilles, which would give him a major base for extending his impact on national politics.
### Left electorate lulled into complacency
In a TV debate on election, one of Le Pen's daughters made the point that if the NF, with about 10% of the vote, and the Communist Party, with another 10%, were excluded from parliament, that would mean that along with the abstentions half of the coun try would not be represented in the next national assembly. That sounded like the beginning of an argument that the parliament would have no real legitimacy.
In fact, the Socialist Party's line of naturally make people wonder about the point of having elections at all, or — to look at it another way — that all the parliamentary politicians decide things among themselves anyway.
Since the election trend was first announced, there has been speculation that the polls showing a large SP victory lulled the left electorate to sleep. That may have been a factor, especially since the June 5 election was only a first round, and the third time people have voted in the last six weeks. But the polls also showed a striking lack of interest in the debate between the SP and the right. The SP's consensus line seems clearly to have had a demobilizing and depoliticizing effect.
Some of the local SP politicians themselves have begun to make rude noises about the "opening." Libération of June 6 quoted Marcel Debarge, an SP leader representative of the party's traditional working-class base, as saying "I am for an opening of the fishing season and nothing else." Jean-Marie Leguen, SP first secretary in Paris International Viewpoint #143 • June 13, 1988 said, "The opening has come a cropper. We didn't get anything on the right, and we didn't mobilize on the left." Electorally, it is clear that the "opening" was a nonstarter. That, of course, is not the first of the SP leadership's concerns. Their objective is to prove to the bourgeoisie that they can be trusted to run the government. Lower down in the party, the mere
The abstention rate was not the only sign that the "opening" fell flat. The non-SP candidates on the presidential majority slate generally did badly. The vote of the Communist Party, which concentrated on denouncing the SP's
"slide to the center" greatly increased its vote. And in a number of areas the candidates of the far-left Juquin committees got significant votes. For example, LCR member David Assouline got 4.6% of the vote the seventh constituency of Paris. In Saint Nazaire, another candidate of the Committees got 5.42%. In the first constituency of Besançon another candidate got 5.36%, twice the vote Juquin received; and in the second constituency, anoth er got 4.53%, coming in ahead of the CP.
For the second round, the LCR has called for an all-out campaign to defeat the right. *