by Philip Short
To the Syrian envoy Mitterrand responded that Naccache and his companions would be freed before his term of office ended in 1988, but at a moment of his choosing and on condition that all four French hostages were freed together and at once.50
He now grasped that Teheran must have a significant role in the kidnappings in Beirut. How else could it offer what was, in effect, an exchange? But he still did not understand that Iran was not merely complicit in the hostage-taking and attendant ‘noises off’ but was orchestrating the whole performance. Hence the government’s perplexity when, on December 7 1985, with the Christmas shopping rush in full swing, bombs exploded simultaneously in two leading department stores, Galeries Lafayette and Printemps, leaving forty-three people injured. There was no credible claim of responsibility and, after following a number of false trails, investigators concluded that it was probably the work of the FARL.
In fact it was a warning that Iran’s patience was running out. Once again the message was not understood. But the Iranians must have concluded that their tactics were having an effect because, less than three weeks later, for reasons which had nothing to do with Iran and everything to do with French domestic politics – parliamentary elections were looming and the government sorely needed a success – Mitterrand improved his offer. He was ready, he told Assad, to grant a pardon to Anis Naccache ‘on medical and humanitarian grounds’ and to release him at the same time as the four French hostages were freed. His four companions would be liberated, as Mitterrand had promised earlier, before the end of his presidential term.51
On New Year’s Eve, at the Syrian leader’s request, the President put the offer in writing, but in very cautious terms. ‘I confirm to you,’ he wrote, ‘the overtures made by France of which you have been informed.’ Mitterrand was no more willing than Assad to set out in a formal letter the details of a hostage transfer which, even if it succeeded, meant caving in to blackmail – as Robert Badinter was once again quick to point out:
Suppose tomorrow two tourists are taken hostage at the Hotel Bristol in Paris and [those responsible] demand that you release without delay a criminal in prison [here] who has been convicted of two murders. I am sure you would not do so. For that would be the end of the justice system in France. The situation today is morally no different. Except that the hostage-taking occurred in Beirut, not the Faubourg St Honoré [in Paris]. . . Nothing seems to me more fraught with danger for the future in the face of terrorists who will remember this example.52
Morally the Justice Minister was right. But Mitterrand had made up his mind. And there was a practical difference between the two situations. In Paris, the GIGN could have intervened and there would have been a chance of rescuing the hostages and perhaps of capturing the kidnappers. In Lebanon, that choice was not available. The only alternatives were to negotiate, as Reagan was doing, or to refuse all contact, as Thatcher had in Britain.
Badinter put aside his scruples and signed a decree of pardon with the date left blank for the President to fill in when the moment came.
On January 2 1986, a Thursday, a first hint of difficulties appeared when an Iranian envoy told the French Foreign Ministry that the Iranian authorities would have preferred Mitterrand to spell out more clearly the ‘modalities and dates’ for the release of Naccache’s four companions. But two days later, Assad wrote that he was ‘convinced’ that there would be ‘a rapid resolution’ and that they were finally on the verge of achieving ‘definitive results’. The plan was for the hostages to be taken to Damascus that evening pending Naccache’s release. In Paris, Roland Dumas waited for a signal from the Syrian Foreign Minister for the Iranian assassin to be flown out to Switzerland en route to Teheran, at which point the hostages would be transferred to the French Ambassador and he himself would leave for Syria to escort them home.
The signal did not come.
Instead, early next morning, Assad telephoned Mitterrand to say there had been a hitch but he hoped it would be resolved. In fact, for reasons the French would slowly piece together in the coming weeks, the window of opportunity had closed. The negotiations had collapsed.
A month later the price of that failure was spelt out in blood.
Over three days, starting on Monday, February 3, four bombs exploded in crowded shopping areas and at the Eiffel Tower. More than thirty people were injured, five seriously. The explosives had been placed to create panic and to wound, not to kill. A previously unknown group, the ‘Support Committee for Arab and Middle Eastern Political Prisoners’, known by its French initials as the CSPPA, announced that it had carried out the attacks and that they would continue until the government released Anis Naccache and his companions; an Armenian terrorist, Varajian Garbidjan, serving a term of life imprisonment for the 1983 Orly Airport attack; and Georges Ibrahim Abdallah of the FARL. That Abdallah’s group and ASALA might have played a role in the attacks was not excluded by French investigators. But the timing suggested they were a follow-up to the stalled negotiations at the turn of the year and that the principal goal remained the Iranians’ release.
By this time it was clear that several factors had combined to cause the hostage exchange to abort. At some point in the first days of January, Teheran learnt that Michel Seurat, who had been suffering from hepatitis since the autumn, was dying and could not be moved.53 The Mullahs’ hopes that Mitterrand would reduce French arms sales to Iraq had also been disappointed – a new contract for thirty-two Mirage jet fighters had been signed that autumn – and, unlike Reagan, he continued to refuse to sell weaponry to Iran. Furthermore there was no sign of the financial dispute between France and Iran nearing resolution. Why give up a bargaining chip – the hostages – when there had been no movement in return? Moreover, despite Assad’s assurances, the Iranians, from Ayatollah Khomeini down, were not convinced that the French President would keep his word. France had promised to free Georges Ibrahim Abdallah in exchange for Peyroles but had not done so. Who was to say that the same thing would not happen to Naccache’s four companions once the French hostages had been freed?
There was another consideration too. If, as seemed almost certain, the Left lost its parliamentary majority in the elections in March, it would open the way for the Right to take power. Might a right-wing government offer a more favourable deal? Emissaries from the Gaullist leader, Jacques Chirac, were in contact with Teheran. Even if, as Chirac later insisted, the talks were purely exploratory, it was a God-given opportunity for the Iranians to sow discord among the French political parties, to ratchet up the pressure on Mitterrand to make additional concessions and, not least, to provide an acceptable explanation for having backed out of an agreement which had actually broken down for quite different reasons. After all, who could blame Iran if the French Right, from electoral calculations, had undercut the Socialists by proposing more attractive terms? The truth about what Chirac’s envoys offered, or did not offer, and what the Iranians read into it, will almost certainly never be known.54 But within days of the negotiations foundering, Iranian intermediaries were telling their contacts in the French government: ‘Your opposition has offered to do better.’
Elections are rarely decided on the basis of foreign policy. Even with the overhang of terrorism and hostage-taking, that remained true in France in 1986. The shape of the next parliament would be determined by domestic issues.
There the picture was nuanced. The emblematic measures of Mitterrand’s first year were still in place and had not been forgotten. Decentralisation had been widely applauded. The ending of the state monopoly over radio and television was overdue (although still incomplete: the French broadcast media remained more subservient to their political masters than those of Britain or the United States). But the ‘glorious fracture’ Mitterrand had promised – the creation of a new social model through a ‘rupture with capitalism’ – was long since dead and buried.
In its place he had installed a regime which anywhere else in Europe would have been described as a social democracy,55 where a c
areful mixture of state initiative and private enterprise was expected to pull the country out of the economic slough in which the rest of Europe was floundering.
Instead of a rupture, Mitterrand had brought reconciliation – the reconciliation of the working class with the notions of profit and enterprise – and it had turned out to be what France needed. The nationalisations, misconceived at the origin, had had a silver lining. The Left had been forced to create conditions in which the nationalised industries could succeed and, in so doing, had learnt to live with what it had previously denounced as the misdeeds of the capitalist economy. French workers began for the first time to understand – as the Germans had long before them – that profits were the investments, and therefore the jobs, of tomorrow. No longer did the unions declare, ‘It’s them or us!’, as Gaston Defferre had exclaimed in 1981. Economics had the same rules for all, whether State or private sector. There had been difficult moments. When Creusot-Loire, the only large French machine-tool manufacturer, declared bankruptcy with the loss of 10,000 jobs, Fabius and Bérégovoy refused to bail it out, breaking an unwritten rule that French governments would always come to the rescue of companies considered too big to fail. The car-maker, Renault, was allowed to shed 20,000 workers. It had been painful, but the result was that French industry became competitive again. Inflation had been brought under control. Foreign debt had stabilised at 10 per cent of GDP. In the autumn of 1985, after four successive devaluations, the government had even been able to announce a modest revaluation of the franc.
Class antagonisms did not disappear altogether but they became more manageable. Ideological schisms, which had determined French political life since the Revolution, while still present, were in retreat. Socialism, like Catholicism before it, was no longer a defining, transcendent world view, but one option among others. With less resistance than anyone would have thought possible, one of the most conservative countries in Europe, profoundly attached to its own rules and traditions, mired in corporatism and an outlandish, almost insular conformity in its thinking and way of life, was dragged into the modern world.
On the other hand unemployment, far from stabilising, had grown by 38 per cent, to 2.4 million, and household income had barely kept pace with inflation.
Mitterrand had reduced some of the most glaring social inequalities, but to give more to the poor – or, as the new political correctness had it, the disadvantaged and underprivileged – at a time when the national cake remained the same because of low economic growth, he had had to take more from the rich and the better off. Members of those groups, who in 1981 had given the Left the benefit of the doubt, were not inclined to make the same mistake a second time. Had the economy turned the corner, opening the prospect of sustained growth, that would have mattered less. But as Mitterrand told Jacques Chaban-Delmas, ‘we needed another six months or a year for public opinion to feel the effects of the political change of direction in 1982 and ’83’. Had he embraced the austerity programme sooner, those effects might already have come through. But he had hesitated. Now he had to face the consequences.
By the summer the only question was not whether the Left would be defeated but by how big a margin.
The Right saw unemployment, insecurity and immigration, the trinity of grievances which most exercised French voters, as a potentially winning cocktail. But the mainstream parties had a rival in exploiting this rich vein of discontent. Mitterrand’s old adversary from the 1950s, the ex-paratrooper, veteran of the wars in Algeria and Indochina, Jean-Marie Le Pen, now headed the National Front, an alliance of far-Right splinter groups formed shortly after de Gaulle’s death which had recently won a following by playing on the fears that had resulted from the Socialist–Communist coalition taking power. The Front argued that the mainstream Right was too weak and in too much disarray to provide a credible alternative and that a muscular administration was needed, capable of putting France’s interests first.
Le Pen had a sulphurous reputation. He had approved the use of torture in Algeria and would later describe the use of the gas chambers to exterminate the Jews as ‘a detail’ of the Second World War. A powerful orator, unconcerned by accusations of racism, he maintained that he merely ‘said out loud what the French people think deep down’. His equation of immigration with joblessness and insecurity resonated strongly not only in working-class areas with high unemployment rates but among elements of the middle and upper classes.
The National Front’s emergence created problems and opportunities for both the Left and the Right. It drove a wedge into the traditional right-wing electorate, draining away votes which would otherwise have gone to Chirac’s RPR and the centrist parties in Giscard’s UDF. That was a boon for the Socialists. Mitterrand had said years before that when he came to power he would ‘hang a “saucepan” on to the Right’. Le Pen’s National Front was the best ‘saucepan’ he could ever hope to find. In 1984, before the European elections, the President had given him a discreet helping hand by making it known to French broadcasters that, ‘in the interests of democracy’, Le Pen, who until then had been excluded from the airwaves, should be allowed to appear like any other party leader. The National Front had gone on to win nearly 11 per cent of the vote that summer, up from a previous best of less than 1 per cent. But the Right had a consolation prize. The Front’s rise had coincided with the vertiginous decline of the Communists, who, since the war, had never won less than 20 per cent of the vote and now saw their support cut in half. The symmetry was striking: the new National Front strongholds – in the industrial north-east and along the Mediterranean coast – were in what had previously been communist areas.56
The upshot was that the Right – National Front and mainstream parties combined – had a clear political majority in the nation as a whole, while the Socialists were condemned by the weakness of their Communist allies. That was not what Mitterrand had had in mind when he had told the Socialist International in 1972 that his goal was ‘to show that out of five million communist voters, three million can vote socialist’. His stratagem to weaken the Communist Party had succeeded beyond his expectations. But instead of going to the Socialists, their votes had been scattered elsewhere.
His response was to play the National Front card for all it was worth. No. 47 of the ‘110 Propositions’ had been to introduce proportional representation for parliamentary, regional and certain types of local elections. In April 1985, the Cabinet approved a bill to that effect, which was enacted by parliament the following July. The Right, predictably, cried foul. Mitterrand, said Chirac, was ‘a politician of great talent and great experience. [He] mounted this whole operation to let the National Front develop.’ It was both true and untrue. The Front had already taken off, as it had shown by its performance in the European elections a year earlier. But by introducing proportional representation, instead of keeping the first-past-the-post constituency system, Mitterrand ensured the election of several dozen extreme right-wing MPs, amputating by the same margin the mainstream right-wing parties’ majority.
The effect was to make the contest more complicated than either side had anticipated. A year earlier, the Right had been confident that it could gain control of parliament without having to rely on the National Front’s support. Now it was not so sure.
Raymond Barre, who had been Giscard’s Prime Minister in the second half of the 1970s and who saw himself as the natural candidate of the Right in the 1988 presidential election, hoped – though he would never admit it – that the assembly would be ungovernable, which would prevent his rival, Chirac, accepting the prime ministership under Mitterrand and using it as a springboard for his own presidential ambitions. Accordingly he denounced the prospect of ‘cohabitation’ between Left and Right as unconstitutional and remained on the sidelines throughout the right-wing parties’ campaign. As Election Day approached, Mitterrand’s popularity, which had plumbed the depths, improved. After being stuck for months at 38 per cent, the proportion of those with favourable opinions of him ros
e in November to 41 per cent and three months later to 46 per cent. The President’s goal – though, like Barre, he could not admit it – was also an ungovernable parliament, in which the Socialists would not have a majority but the Right would not have one either.
Mitterrand, like Chirac, faced a problem of disunity in his own camp. Fabius, as Prime Minister, and Jospin, as Socialist Party First Secretary, were no longer speaking to each other. Fabius stressed the need to win back the moderate centrist voters who had helped to assure Mitterrand’s victory in 1981; Jospin wanted to ensure that the Left came out in force. The President settled the quarrel of personalities by coming down on Jospin’s side. But the dilemma over policy was more difficult. Mitterrand needed the support of both the Centre and the Left. Squaring that particular circle was beyond even his considerable powers of doublespeak, but it did not stop him trying.
At his first election meeting, in the suburbs of Rouen in Normandy in mid-January, he set out deliberately to encourage the Left, declaring, ‘I do not want a France where the strongest, because they are richest, will be able to crush the weakest, because they are poorest’. That galvanised his traditional supporters but left him open to the charge of behaving like a party chieftain rather than Head of State, with the implication, as Chirac was quick to point out, that if the Left were disavowed at the elections, the President would be disavowed too. Three weeks later, at Lille, on February 7 1986, he changed tack:
The French have the right to choose the [parliamentary] majority they prefer . . . People say to me when I address a meeting like this . . ., ‘How dare you! You shouldn’t, it’s unworthy of a President’, forgetting that my predecessors used and misused [their power to influence election campaigns] far more than I have done.
Some say, ‘You are [behaving as] a party leader.’ No, I’m not a party leader. I used to be. But it isn’t me any more. You may have noticed . . .