France: The Right's Narrow Victory

Rarely had postwar France faced a political sweepstakes fraught with so many unpredictable consequences as it did in Sunday's legislative elections. Up for grabs were 577 National Assembly seats, contested by some 7,000 candidates, who were debating issues that ranged from the future of the country's nationalized industries to ways of solving France's high unemployment. Also at stake was nothing less than the future of the Fifth Republic.

Since the birth of the Republic in 1958, the party of the President has also controlled the legislature. No one was quite certain how a government would operate with a President from one party and the legislature in the hands of another. Yet that appeared the likely outcome. Socialist President François Mitterrand's term runs until 1988, but his party seemed destined to lose the parliamentary majority it has enjoyed since 1981. The election was expected to produce a political griffin with the head of a Socialist and the body of a conservative. More unnerving still, the mismatched leftist President and rightist legislature would be expected to embark on cohabitation, as the French say, or living together, until the presidential election, which is now expected in 1988.

France's 35 million voters seemed reluctant, though, to hurl themselves into such uncharted waters. The Socialists, who had been regularly going down to defeat in local and regional elections since 1983, seemed to be picking up votes in the final days of the campaign. Adding to the uncertainty, the election was held against the backdrop of a hostage drama being played out in Beirut, where Shi'ite extremists claimed to have executed one Frenchman and held seven others prisoner.

But despite the terrorist action and the late surge in favor of the Socialists, French voters gave the conservative Union of the Opposition a slim victory. Early returns showed the rightist alliance made up of the neo-Gaullist Rally for the Republic (R.P.R.) and the center-right Union for French Democracy (U.D.F.) winning more than 40% of the vote. That would give them about 290 seats in parliament, just more than the 289 needed for a majority. The Socialists got about 30%, or approximately 210 seats. They will thus remain the biggest single group in parliament.

On the two political extremes, the fringe parties had very different fortunes. The National Front, a far right party that had waged an anti-immigrant campaign, did fairly well, obtaining about 10%, which will give them some 30 seats. On the left, however, the decline of the Communist Party continued. As recently as 1979, the Communists won 20% of the vote in a national election. But this year they got only about 10% of the vote, and will have approximately 30 seats in the new Assembly. They had 44 in the outgoing one.