The Counterweight

POWERFUL SURGE OF COMMUNIST PARTY, said the triumphant headline in the French Communist newspaper L'Humanité, and a balloting in the first of two weeks' municipal elections in 38,000 French communities seemed to bear L'Humanité out. In France's 13 largest cities, the Communists polled 27.7% of the vote, regaining the title of France's largest party from the Gaullist Union for the New Republic, which swept last November's elections to the National Assembly. The U.N.R. polled little more than three-quarters of its previous vote.

Along with the Communists, most of the rest of France's long established parties—the Socialists, the Radicals, the Catholic M.R.P.—regained ground. In November's Assembly elections, the power of De Gaulle's name, and disgust with the shortcomings of the old Fourth Republic, had swept the fledgling U.N.R. into office. In local elections, however, Frenchmen are primarily influenced by local issues, familiar faces, and entrenched machines. Accordingly, it was the old hands who did best last week.

In Marseille, powerful left-wing Socialist Gaston Defferre, who has brought efficiency to his long mismanaged city, won revenge for the loss of his Assembly seat in November by polling more than four times as many votes for mayor as the U.N.R. In Lyon, Jacques Soustelle, the dynamic organizer of the U.N.R., ran a poor third after Radical Socialists and Communists. The one big U.N.R. victor was Jacques Chaban-Delmas, president of the National Assembly, who could point to an outstanding twelve-year record as mayor of Bordeaux.

Though decided by local considerations, last week's elections nonetheless had national significance. Under De Gaulle's new constitution, the election of France's Senate and the election of the President of the Republic are to be in the hands of electoral colleges largely composed of municipal councilors. Result is that the new Senate to be elected next month is likely to bear considerable resemblance in its party groupings to the Chamber of Deputies of the Fourth Republic. As such, the Senate will be a counterweight to the U.N.R.-dominated Assembly—a development not likely to discomfit De Gaulle, who has never wanted to see France ruled by a single, all-powerful "Gaullist" party.