Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  It was better than any soap opera. Here, live on television, a full-scale political crisis was unfolding before the nation’s eyes. Would Mitterrand prevail? Would Chirac resign?

  The President acknowledged to his aides that he was ‘on a knife-edge’.

  That evening, the telephone rang. It was Chirac:

  MITTERRAND: For at least two months I have repeatedly made clear to you my serious reservations about the use of decrees [for privatisation]. I do not wish to take responsibility for these measures. Decrees on other matters for the most part I will sign, subject to their content. Why not in this case proceed [through parliament]? . . .

  CHIRAC: So you want to bring an end to cohabitation?

  MITTERRAND: I do not want that. But I assume the consequences of my actions. I don’t blame you. You must do as you think best . . . If you had gone through parliament from the outset this might be over by now. I told you I would not sign . . . I will not give way . . .

  CHIRAC: According to the lawyers, the President does not have the right to refuse to sign decrees . . .

  MITTERRAND: I will not give way . . . If it puts an end to this experience [of cohabitation], well, I shall regret it. [But] I am a free agent. The only thing I want is to finish my mandate properly. That said, if there has to be a crisis, I’ve been expecting it ever since [the elections]. And I’ve known what the election results were going to be for four years . . . If you think a crisis is inevitable, I accept it . . . To tell the truth, it’s already a miracle that we’ve managed [to work together] for four months. Let us try to make this miracle last. I warned you, but you did not believe me.3

  When he put down the phone, Mitterrand turned to Attali and Bianco. ‘We will see what he does,’ he said. ‘He’ll change his mind three times and then he’ll back down . . . He’s not a bad fellow.’

  Chirac was in a dilemma. Mitterrand had chosen his ground carefully. How could Chirac convince public opinion that he was justified in provoking a crisis . . . to do what? To sidestep parliament? If he resigned – having done so once before under Giscard – he would be accused of lacking the steady hand that statesmanship requires. If Mitterrand dissolved parliament, proportional representation still applied. The President’s popularity was back over 60 per cent. It was not certain that the right-wing parties would be able to improve, or even retain, their majority.4

  The Young Turks on the Right urged a showdown.

  Balladur, supported by the Interior Minister, Charles Pasqua, argued for caution. Reluctantly, Chirac agreed. He dressed it up as an act of responsible government. When the Cabinet met, two days later, he told Mitterrand that to avoid ‘a grave political crisis’ the government would ask parliament to pass a bill rather than legislating by decree. That night he spoke on television. Mitterrand, he said, had opposed the ‘clearly expressed will of the majority’, but he had decided to spare the country a crisis ‘which the French people would not understand’. Parliament enacted the required legislation and Mitterrand signed it into law soon afterwards.

  For the President, it was a decisive victory.

  The pretext was contrived, even flimsy: what difference did it make in the end whether the privatisations were carried out by decree or by parliamentary vote? But it had enabled him to show the country the limits of the Prime Minister’s power. Chirac had been scalded. His spokesman, Denis Baudouin, quoted him as saying afterwards: ‘I don’t want any more problems, no clashes with Mitterrand.’ François Bujon de l’Estang, his diplomatic adviser, said: ‘It was the turning point . . . From that day on, Mitterrand’s recovery was unstoppable.’

  Baudouin and de l’Estang both felt that Chirac had made ‘a monumental, fatal error’ by staying on. So long as the RPR leader remained Prime Minister, Mitterrand would suffocate him. Had he slammed the door and regained his freedom he might have done no better. But by remaining he helped to perpetuate a state of affairs – cohabitation – for which public opinion gave Mitterrand the credit. Jean-Louis Bianco was not alone in thinking that had the Prime Minister risen to the challenge and tendered his resignation, Mitterrand might have been in difficulty.

  The President had taken a gamble. He was much less certain of winning than he had let on. Chirac had exposed himself by choosing a modus operandi vulnerable to a presidential veto and Mitterrand had pounced.

  That the President’s instincts had proved correct said much about the relationship between them. One was cold and introspective, the other warm and extrovert. The Prime Minister was sixteen years younger. To Mitterrand he was ‘energetic, tenacious, intelligent and hard-working . . . but he lacks internal solidity and perhaps, also, real character’. Chirac recalled a warning from Pompidou: ‘Never let Mitterrand impress you. No matter what he tells you, never believe a word he says.’ But then Chirac added: ‘It’s true that Mitterrand always has that refined, subtle, intelligent way of enveloping you.’ Therein lay the difference. Chirac admired Mitterrand and deep down he wanted the President to like him. ‘What an artist!’ he would say, after Mitterrand had wrought some particularly subtle piece of political magic, ‘I take my hat off to him. I don’t know how to do that kind of thing.’ Mitterrand appreciated Chirac’s qualities and was sometimes moved by his generous impulses. But he did not admire him or even regard him as being on the same level. It was an unequal contest.

  If the dispute over the signing of decrees established a pecking order for cohabitation, it did not put an end to turf fights.

  In April Reagan decided to mount a raid against Libya, suspected, with good reason, of fomenting terrorist attacks against US interests. Thatcher, against the advice of most of her Cabinet, agreed to let American aircraft fly from British bases. Mitterrand and Chirac, who felt the main effect of the raid would be to rally the Arab world behind Gaddafi, decided jointly to forbid the planes to overfly France. Spain did the same. On April 14, the Americans went ahead, killing some sixty Libyans, most of them civilians, including Gaddafi’s adopted daughter.

  A week later Chirac claimed on television that he was the one who had taken the decision to ban overflights; Mitterrand had merely acquiesced.

  The following month the President had his revenge. Chirac insisted on accompanying him to the G7 summit in Tokyo. At the plenary sessions, where each country was represented by the head of delegation and two ministers, the Japanese agreed that he could occupy one of the two ministerial seats. But they insisted that when the delegation leaders met alone, as would be the case at the opening dinner and the first working session, the French Prime Minister would be excluded. To get round that problem, Chirac arrived 24 hours late, pleading pressure of work at home. At a meeting with his Japanese counterpart, Yasuhiro Nakasone, he tried to explain that things had changed in Paris and Mitterrand had lost much of his power. Next day, Japan’s biggest newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, published embarrassing extracts from their conversation, including Nakasone’s conclusion: ‘So to sum up, you are like newly-weds, you don’t yet understand each other very well?’

  Throughout the three-day summit, the bickering continued. Mitterrand explained to the Japanese press that France ‘should only have one voice abroad’. Chirac’s adviser, Bujon de l’Estang, rejoined: ‘A single voice can express itself through two different mouths.’

  But the knockout blow came at the very end. Mitterrand insisted that at the final press conference he should set out the French position. The Prime Minister was seated apart, like a royal consort, neither beside the President nor with the official delegation. To the television audience at home, the image was devastating: Mitterrand spoke for France while Chirac sat and listened.

  ‘I shouldn’t have gone to Tokyo,’ he acknowledged afterwards.

  It was the same story at the EEC summits at The Hague, in June, and in London, in December. Chirac insisted that France should have three chairs at the negotiating table instead of the usual two. ‘Mrs Thatcher agrees,’ he told Mitterrand. ‘She may do,’ the President replied, ‘but I do not. It’s in her inter
est to weaken France by showing its divisions. It’s not in mine.’

  There was one last kerfuffle in Madrid the following spring, when Chirac accused his Socialist predecessors of having bungled Spain’s entry into the Community. He was publicly reprimanded for it by Mitterrand next morning and, two years later, acknowledged that it had not been a very clever thing to say.

  Apart from hair-splitting over protocol, the importance of which was limited to its effect on the two leaders’ images at home, there were few substantive disagreements over foreign policy.

  After their initial bewilderment, France’s partners grew accustomed to dealing with this odd couple that the Gaullist constitution had thrown up. Thatcher and Reagan welcomed Chirac as one of their own, a fellow right-winger who shared their economic goals. Gorbachev sought a middle path, preserving his relationship with Mitterrand while building ties with Chirac in case he should become President afterwards. Helmut Kohl stuck with the devil he knew and maintained the partnership with ‘François’ that had functioned so well up to then.

  There were moments of (expensive) farce, as when President and Prime Minister arrived in Siberia in separate Concordes, which parked on the apron at Novosibirsk nose to nose. There were false notes – or ‘quacks’, as the French put it – as in November 1986, when, meeting Thatcher, Mitterrand urged an increase in EEC spending on research while Chirac, sitting beside him, looked meaningfully at the British Prime Minister, shaking his head, and then proceeded a few minutes later to advance the contrary opinion. There were moments of truth, as at Brussels in February 1988, when the comradeship between Chirac and Thatcher frayed to the point where the French Prime Minister exploded, ‘Bollocks!’, after a particularly long day of British obstruction. ‘Whenever you start speaking,’ he told her, ‘you get angry and lay down the law. How do you expect anyone to ask your opinion after that?’ And there was constant low-level sniping. The flood of diplomatic telegrams which were normally copied to the Elysée became a trickle after the new team took office and then dried up altogether. Information is the lifeblood of government. When the Elysée’s protests were to no avail, back-channels were set up with the help of sympathetic officials who arranged for photocopies of sensitive messages to find their way to Mitterrand’s desk.

  The one area of foreign policy in which Mitterrand and Chirac had serious differences was arms control.

  There had been a preliminary skirmish shortly after Chirac was appointed. He told Mitterrand that he wanted France to participate in Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ initiative. ‘France will never take part as long as I am here,’ the President replied. ‘If you like I will call a referendum on it and I shall win.’ Chirac did not raise it again.

  But a much deeper rift developed over doctrine.

  To Mitterrand the fundamental paradox from which all nuclear doctrine derived was that nuclear arms were not weapons because they could not be used to win wars. Their only purpose was deterrence. It was essentially what Reagan and Gorbachev had said at Geneva a year earlier: ‘a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought’. It followed that battlefield nuclear weapons were a contradiction in terms: all types of nuclear weapon, whatever their purpose and range, were by definition strategic. The ‘coupling’ of Europe to America by the deployment of Pershings and cruise missiles – necessary though it had been to restore the nuclear balance – was an illusion. No matter what mechanisms were put in place, no one could be certain that the United States would come to Europe’s aid if its own survival were threatened. That meant that Reagan’s ‘Option Zero’ proposal, which Mitterrand had initially opposed, needed to be exhumed and re-examined. If even battlefield weapons would unleash an uncontrollable nuclear firestorm, what was the point of keeping them? It was the logical conclusion to his opposition to ‘flexible response’. Not only was the doctrine vain, because in practice it could never be applied, but it was pernicious, because if it were ever attempted full-scale nuclear war would follow.

  Chirac and André Giraud strongly disagreed.

  To the Defence Minister, the ‘nuclear umbrella’ was the foundation of French defence strategy and the concept of ‘flexible response’, based on the possibility of graduated escalation stopping short of a strategic exchange, was still the core of nuclear planning. It followed that France should modernise its tactical nuclear weapons – Pluton and Hades – and that it needed to develop a mobile missile, the SX, to complement France’s land-based nuclear silos on the plateau d’Albion in north-western Provence, which were vulnerable to attack.

  Mitterrand rejected that logic. Vulnerability, he argued, was itself an element of deterrence. Any country which wished to attack France would know that destroying its land-based silos would expose it to an automatic counter-strike by French submarine-launched missiles. To add mobile launchers would increase the risk of a blanket nuclear attack, since the adversary would no longer know where France’s nuclear arsenal was located. It would in no way enhance French security because the moment an attack was launched it would mean that deterrence had failed.

  Between such radically different philosophies there was no middle path. But Mitterrand held the nuclear codes and presided over the meetings of the Defence Council where French nuclear policy was determined. It was not a battle the government could win.

  The President was all the more convinced that ‘Option Zero’ should be revived because he believed that the new leadership in Moscow was sincere about wanting to disarm. ‘Gorbachev is the first Soviet statesman to behave like a man of the modern age,’ he told Reagan in July 1986. ‘His future depends on [raising] Soviet living standards, not the number of missiles he has . . . He’s staking his political life on this. Should we help him to succeed? Or on the contrary, should we . . . push him to fail?’ Reagan was sceptical: ‘Does he really mean to give up the basis of their foreign policy – expansionism and world communism?’ he asked. ‘So far he hasn’t said so.’ Nonetheless, the idea that Gorbachev was ‘very different from the others’, as Reagan put it, was beginning to take hold. Three months later, at Reykjavik, the United States and the Soviet Union came within a hair’s breadth of agreement on an ‘Option Zero’ covering all types of nuclear weapon, tactical, intermediate and strategic, retaining only 100 missiles each in the Asian theatre to counter Chinese nuclear forces.

  The understandings which Reagan and Gorbachev reached in private in Iceland that weekend were visionary, offering for the first (and until now the last) time the possibility of completely dismantling the world’s two biggest nuclear arsenals.

  They foundered because of disagreement over ‘Star Wars’, which Reagan refused to give up. The Pentagon, the Soviet military and Reagan’s allies in Europe breathed a collective sigh of relief. At a hastily arranged meeting in London four days later, Thatcher told Mitterrand: ‘Can you imagine? Reagan almost accepted the disappearance of nuclear arms! In that case everything would have been to the Russians’ advantage right across the board.’

  She had a point. The Russians had 3.5 million men in uniform and 27,000 tanks, several times NATO’s forces in the European theatre. If the US nuclear arsenal were eliminated, the only deterrent to a Soviet invasion would be French and British nuclear forces. Pressure from Washington and Moscow for them to be dismantled as well would quickly become irresistible.

  ‘I’m stunned,’ she went on,

  It’s terrible, what happened . . . Reagan has a dream that SDI will rid the world of nuclear weapons. I don’t believe in it. But . . . he thinks it will give him a place in the history books and without SDI he wouldn’t have that. He’s mesmerised by it. It’s harder to deal with someone who has a dream than someone who has a real objective.5

  Mitterrand was more sanguine. He agreed that Reagan’s proposals were ‘madness [and] brought us close to catastrophe’.6 But so long as the reduction in strategic forces did not exceed 50 per cent, they would still provide a counterweight to Soviet conventional superiority and the cuts would not be enough to endanger the Britis
h and French nuclear forces. Moreover Gorbachev’s proposals for ‘Option Zero’ for intermediate nuclear forces and for the abolition of chemical weapons represented a considerable advance and were well worth pursuing. The real problem, in his view, lay elsewhere:

  Do [the Americans] consider the invasion of Europe a cause for war? [I have] a simple question to put to [them]: What will you do if the Russians put a foot across the border into Europe? Will you use your nuclear weapons – yes or no? If yes, that’s well and good. If no, our Alliance isn’t serious.7

  Eight months later, over dinner at the G7 summit in Venice, the subject came up again:

  THATCHER: If war broke out and the Soviets besieged Bonn, would you employ French atomic weapons?

  MITTERRAND: Certainly not.

  THATCHER: Then how can you expect the United States one day to come to the help of Paris?

  MITTERRAND: You are deliberately mixing up two different issues. De Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard and I have always had a doubt about the United States’ intentions. There’s nothing automatic about their intervention . . . That’s why we have our own autonomous deterrent. But we can’t use it for just anything . . . It’s not France’s role to protect Germany and Western Europe. That’s the mission of the Atlantic Alliance.8

  Turning to Reagan, he then recalled the words of the Austrian Chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, a month before the Nazi invasion, ‘Thus far but no further!’, to which almost fifty years earlier, he had devoted his first published political commentary:

  MITTERRAND: You [also] say. ‘Thus far and no further!’ . . . It’s the great error of the Alliance, this elastic, ‘flexible response’. It’s only done that way so that you Americans have a reason not to intervene in Europe.