FRANCE: Off and Running

Rocard enlivens the race

For 2 ½ years he has been stalking his prey, sometimes discreetly, sometimes unabashedly. Last week Michel Rocard finally made his ambitions official. From the town hall he occupies as mayor of the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, the compact (5 ft. 6 in.), crimson-cheeked economist formally declared that he was challenging François Mitterrand for the Socialist Party's nomination as its candidate against Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in the presidential election next May. Rocard gracefully suggested that Mitterrand, a veteran of more than three decades in French politics, could stay on as party leader. But the true meaning of Rocard's announcement was best summed up by an irreverent headline in the newspaper Le Quotidien de Paris

—ROCARD: MITTERRAND TO THE MUSEUM, I TO THE ÉLYSÉE.

Rocard became the third major candidate to join France's presidential race. The Communists, to no one's surprise, have designated Party Leader Georges Marchais, 60. Michel Debre, 68, who was Charles de Gaulle's Prime Minister from 1958 to 1962, has launched an independent candidacy designed to discourage Neo-Gaullist Leader and Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac. Rocard, though, is the only French politician given any chance of mounting a credible campaign against Giscard. Recent polls give Rocard more than 48% against Giscard. Mitterrand, who with 49.2% in 1974 came within a hairbreadth of the presidency, scores only 43%.

Rocard, who is 14 years younger than Mitterrand, has an engaging, feisty personality; his quick mind and sharp tongue come across well on television. Above all, he appeals to non-Socialist moderates. He has never concealed his distaste for the Union of the Left, the Socialist-Communist alliance that almost won the 1974 presidential election, only to collapse just before the parliamentary vote of 1978. Rocard is far more comfortable with West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's brand of social democracy than with the quasi-Marxist yearnings of his own party's left wing. Mitterrand's intentions are a mystery. Most likely, he will try to remain aloof, hoping that a divided party will turn to him as a unifier at its January congress. Giscard professes to be unfazed by Rocard's candidacy. The President's advisers are convinced that Rocard will fall victim to what Frenchmen now call the Teddy Kennedy phenomenon: a sharp decline in popularity once the candidate comes out in the open. Rocard does have a vulnerable side: a tendency to shoot from the hip. Last summer he seriously suggested sending the French navy into the Baltic to rescue Poles in the event of a Soviet invasion. Such pronouncements might seem to make him an easy campaign target. Nonetheless, Giscard would rather run against Mitterrand—if only to defeat, once and for all, those Socialist Party leftists who still long for an alliance with the Communists. ∙