FRANCE: The Importance of Elections

For the eighth time in the four years of the Fourth Republic, France was without a cabinet. Foreign representatives at the Big Four conference arrived in Paris this week with no French ministers to receive them. The 1951 budget sat in the Assembly without a leadership to push it through. France, the hope of Western Europe, could barely carry on its routine internal administration.

Premier Rene Pleven, in office for seven months, had resigned after failing to get the parties in his Third Force coalition to agree on a plan to change France's election law. Wrapped up in the electoral issue is the political future of France. Unless the election system is drastically changed, French governments will continue to totter along with weak coalitions of fractional parties facing a solid Communist bloc. The electoral fight boils down to one question: Are the differences between the non-Communist parties greater than the difference between them as a group and the Communists?

"All Very Simple." Since 1946, the French National Assembly has been elected by proportional representation, a system which tends to encourage minority parties, especially those whose strength is widely spread throughout the nation. P.R. is supposed to be in accord with a deep-seated characteristic of the French people. The argument runs that the French are too "logical" to form large, loose political groupings, American style. At least as good an argument can be made that the French are no more logical in politics than any other people, and that the small French parties are the result of rather than the reason for the French electoral laws.

In the Fourth Republic, P.R. has given the Communists a definite advantage. This does not mean that the number of Communists in the Chamber is out of line with the number of Communists in the country. It does mean that P.R. tends to suppress the overriding political fact in France today, i.e., that the fundamental issue lies between the Communists and the nonCommunists. On the surface, the non-Communist parties agree that the election law should be changed so as to diminish Communist strength, but when they get down to cases, each non-Communist party seeks a law that will give it an advantage over the other. The Communists, who want to keep the present law, simply vote with whatever non-Communist group is against any particular new scheme. This has defeated all efforts at reform.

Last week Communist Party Secretary Jacques Duclos cynically summed up France's current crisis. Said he: "It is all very simple. They have agreed to take away our seats in the Assembly. They are in disagreement about how to divide our seats up among themselves."

Party Dilemmas. The Radical Socialists want to return to the two-ballot voting used in the Third Republic. Under this system, if no candidate got an absolute majority on the first ballot, a runoff election was held a week later, in which any combination of parties could elect a single candidate. A flexible center party, the Radicals hope to gain a lot by being able to make deals to their right & left.