France: A Campaign Catches Fire

Giscard takes on his challengers—and those notorious diamonds

The French presidential campaign had begun to resemble a tedious exercise in shadowboxing and issue ducking. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing remained in lofty seclusion behind the ornate iron gates of the Elysée Palace. Socialist Candidate Francois Mitterrand slipped away for tours to the U.S. and China. Neo-Gaullist Jacques Chirac drifted off for a week in the Caribbean. Even Communist Candidate Georges Marchais confined himself largely to preaching to the converted in party districts like Paris' working-class suburbs. Then suddenly last week, the gloves came off and the slugging began.

Giscard landed the first blows. During a televised panel interview, he taunted principal rival Mitterrand, a two-time loser in previous election bids, for his record as France's most unsuccessful presidential candidate. Giscard charged that sooner or later Mitterrand would be forced to make a deal with the Communists. The pointed implication: he would not be able to get elected, or govern, without Communist support.

It was a masterly performance. Gone were the Louis XV chairs and crystal chandeliers of Giscard's previous televised appearances from the presidential palace that had contributed to a growing image of "monarchical" hauteur. In the state-run TV studio, a relaxed and animated President chatted, swiveled in his chair and consulted visual aids to make his points. His new style made a good-humored mockery of journalists' questions about the "Giscardian monarchy." Said he: "You are posing stupid questions, but I will answer them."

Mitterrand retaliated with a broadside of his own. Speaking in a televised campaign appearance, he called Giscard Moscow's "little mailman," a malicious reference to charges that the French President had conveyed word from Leonid Brezhnev last year of a phony Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. The President, he continued, had received a virtual endorsement from the Soviet newspaper Pravda for his secret meeting with Brezhnev last May. Said Mitterrand: "I understand why Pravda is content with Mr. Giscard d'Estaing. I did not wait eleven days to protest the invasion of Afghanistan." Fortunately, he added, "it is not the Russians who are voting, but the French." In his own defense, Mitterrand managed to downplay his major liability—past association with the defunct Socialist-Communist Alliance—by indicating that he would bring no Communists into a Mitterrand Cabinet.

Giscard lieutenants, who only the day before had talked smugly about remaining above the fray, could no longer contain themselves. Foreign Minister Jean François-Poncet blasted Mitterrand for his lack of patriotism and the "rudeness of his expression." Fumed Prime Minister Raymond Barre: "As a Frenchman, I was revolted."