France Shades of Le Grand Charles

Blessed with incumbency and lack of a serious challenge from the left, Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, 71, easily captured the front runner's spot in this year's French presidential campaign. The real contest leading up to the first round of voting on April 24 was between his two conservative opponents, Premier Jacques Chirac and former Premier Raymond Barre, who were running neck and neck in the polls as recently as February. This week the campaign moves into its final phase, during which the release of new voter surveys is forbidden. The biggest news in the flurry of last-minute polls was not that Mitterrand continued to lead the field but that Chirac had emerged as a clear favorite to challenge him in the second round of balloting on May 8.

According to a poll published in the weekly Le Point, the President could capture as much as 37.5% of the vote in the first round. Chirac and Barre, who had split a 40% share almost evenly in earlier surveys, collected about the same total in this one, but it was weighted in Chirac's favor, 24.5% to 16%. Moreover, while the survey results indicated that Chirac would lose to Mitterrand 48% to 52% in a two-way race, they also showed that Barre would fare worse, losing 46% to 54%. The Le Point findings represented a sharp setback for Barre, 64, who had based his candidacy on the contention that he was the center right's best bet to beat Mitterrand. Barre gamely sought to fire up his campaign in the final days, adding factory tours and cafe stops, but the momentum appeared to remain with Chirac. Said a Chirac campaign official of Barre's comeback chances: "We believe it is too late for him."

Chirac, the first of the major candidates to enter the race, conducted a run-everywhere campaign and relied heavily on the formidable organization of his neo-Gaullist Rally for the Republic Party. Barre, by contrast, played down his association with the Union for French Democracy, a loose coalition of center-right parties, and consequently failed to secure a partisan boost. Even though Barre, an economics professor, offered a more trenchant critique of Mitterrand's economic and defense policies than Chirac, all too often he did so in a style better suited to university lecture halls than to political rallies. Said Political Scientist Olivier Duhamel of the University of Paris- Nanterre: "He has spoken Gaullist words but failed to achieve a Gaullist style."

If so, Barre was not the only candidate to try. In a campaign that has heavily emphasized style over substance, Gaullist imagery cropped up often enough, as it has in past contests, to give an eerie ring of arrived truth to Charles de Gaulle's imperious prophecy that "every Frenchman was, is or one day will be a Gaullist." Mitterrand, an opponent of De Gaulle for the ten years of the general's presidency, also presented himself as an above-the-fray candidate, rarely mentioning the word Socialist and allowing himself to be described by Socialist Party Chairman Lionel Jospin as a leader who acquired popular support "far beyond the normal limits of his political camp." Chirac, with more ideological claim to the De Gaulle mantle than either of the other candidates, but too young to talk of deep personal ties to him, was careful to invoke the general's name in speeches and to collect endorsements of venerables from the Gaullist era.