Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  It was an odd situation. Mitterrand and Chirac were expected to work together to run the country’s affairs while engaged in a frontal struggle for power. In reality that was what they had been doing all along. The difference now was that it was out in the open.

  The campaign was odd, too.

  Chirac had declared his candidacy in mid-January, Barre three weeks later. The Prime Minister had the money and the electoral machine, the ‘soldier-monks of the RPR’, as Léotard had called them. Barre had neither but exuded a high sense of his own worth. ‘A lot of people can see one [Barre] as Head of State,’ Mitterrand commented, ‘but he doesn’t have the means to get there, while the other [Chirac] has the means, but people don’t believe he can do it.’

  Chirac’s problem was, as it had been from the start, how to win back the extreme Right while retaining the support of middle-of-the-road voters. Michel Noir had written in Le Monde: ‘Better to lose the presidential election than lose our soul treating with Le Pen and his ideas.’ Chirac was furious but the opinion polls afterwards showed that a large majority of the electorate agreed.

  Barre’s problem was different and partly of his own making. He argued that, as de Gaulle had intended, a presidential election should ‘hinge on the direct relationship between one man and the people’. Campaigning was pointless because ‘either you are elected or you are not’. The fact that he was a poor public speaker no doubt comforted him in this view, but it was also a position of principle. ‘To win the presidency,’ he said a year later, ‘you have to be ready to say and do just about anything. I did not want to do that.’

  Mitterrand’s position was different again. He was virtually certain of re-election and was reluctant to compromise the dignity of the presidency by plunging into the fray. For the first two weeks after declaring his candidacy, he refused to campaign at all, much as de Gaulle had done in 1965. Instead of advancing a political programme – ‘a matter for political parties, not for a President of the Republic or someone who aspires to become one’ – he wrote a 47-page ‘Letter to all the French’, intended as ‘a sort of shared reflection, of the kind which happens among the family, around the table in the evening’, covering ‘all the big subjects which are worth discussing and mulling over between French men and women’.

  He spent a week writing and polishing it, and the night before it was to be published stayed up till 3 a.m. at the printing press, correcting the proofs, like a neophyte brooding over a first novel. Two million copies were inserted as a supplement in national and provincial newspapers, and several million more printed for Socialist militants to distribute door to door.

  The contrast with 1981 was striking. The ‘110 Propositions’ had laid out a revolutionary programme for changing society. The ‘Letter’ was cautious and sage, offering middle-of-the-road nostrums to bandage society’s ills. There would be ‘neither nationalisations nor privatisations’. The wealth tax, which Chirac had abolished, would be restored but its scope would be so narrow as to affect only the super-rich, and the revenue would be used to help the very poor.

  The ‘Letter’ was ‘very pale pink’, one leading analyst wrote. Le Monde wondered when the President would bring himself ‘to use the word, “socialism”. Even “Left” would be a sensation.’

  ‘There are two ways to keep the people amused,’ Barre commented. ‘One is to flood them with false promises: that was done in 1981. The other is to dull their senses by making them dream: that is what is being done today. Goodnight, little ones, sweet dreams! Tonton is looking after you . . .’

  It was a non-campaign, ‘smooth, without presence’, focussed almost entirely on winning over the political Centre. Remaining neutral, keeping the Socialists at arm’s length while encouraging them to direct their attacks at Chirac and the RPR, was a dual strategy. The goal was to label the Prime Minister a creature of the hard Right, ensuring that he would get through the first round at the price of alienating Barre’s supporters, who would then be more likely to switch sides and vote for Mitterrand in the run-off.

  Mitterrand had no alternative. The decline of the Communist Party meant that there was no longer a majority on the Left. The RPR, the UDF and the National Front together accounted for 52 per cent of voting intentions; the Socialists, Communists, Greens and extreme Left (not all of whom would vote for Mitterrand in the second round) made up only 48 per cent. To win, the President had to obtain the backing of at least part of the middle-of-the-road electorate which normally supported the Centre-Right.

  This policy of ‘opening’, as Mitterrand called it, did not go down well with the Left, which made its views known in no uncertain terms at his first big rally at Rennes on April 8:

  Among the ranks of the opposition, there are worthwhile people, excellent people . . . (No! No!) . . . But yes, there are! . . . (Boos, whistling, jeers . . .) Believe me, there are! I even spend time with them sometimes . . . (Redoubled booing) We are not the [only] good ones, they are not [all] bad! . . . (Whistles, shouts of ‘Yes, they are!’) . . . even though they think that they are good and we are bad! (Laughter, applause)22

  Mitterrand had extricated himself but drew two lessons from the crowd’s reaction.

  Staying neutral was not enough. To carry left-wing voters behind him, he would have to give them more encouragement and his overtures to moderate voters would need to be more discreet.23 After Rennes, the direction of the campaign subtly altered, taking on a more socialist coloration.

  It was acceptable to make cautious gestures towards Barre’s supporters, who shared his distaste for the RPR’s smash-and-grab tactics. It was acceptable for him to call for a large ‘opening . . . as regards men and ideas’ and to speak out against sectarianism. It was acceptable to promote Michel Rocard, by far the most popular Socialist leader, who represented the right wing of the Party, as a foretaste of what a second term might bring. Mitterrand had been cultivating Rocard for months, and ten days after the meeting in Rennes took him on a long, rain-drenched walk through the mountains of the Cévennes, in the Massif Central. Next day photographs of the two of them, in boots, raincoats and jerkins, and identical flat caps, were on the front pages of every newspaper in the country. They signalled to middle-of-the-road voters that if Mitterrand were re-elected, his second term would be very different from the first.

  But to go further and suggest that right-wing ministers, even the most moderate among them, might participate in a left-wing government was a step too far.

  It was the mirror image of the problem that Chirac was confronting. But it was easier for Mitterrand to find common ground between the Centre and the Left than for the Prime Minister to reconcile the Centre and the extreme Right.

  On Sunday, April 24, when the votes were counted, Mitterrand had 34 per cent, a little less than he had hoped for. But Chirac’s support had collapsed. With 19.94 per cent, the Prime Minister had three percentage points less than he had been credited with in the polls. The reason for the missing numbers was clear: Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had been expected to get 12 per cent, had obtained almost 14.5 per cent of the vote. Far from winning back National Front voters, as he and Pasqua had hoped, a crucial part of Chirac’s support had been siphoned off by the far Right. The Prime Minister was devastated. François Bujon de l’Estang said he was ‘like a mechanical toy to which you’ve lost the key’.

  Barre came in third, with 16.5 per cent, and offered his rival a poisonous endorsement: ‘I support Jacques Chirac [and] I count on him [to] reject xenophobia, racism and all extremisms’, those being precisely the reservations of Barre’s supporters about the Prime Minister’s campaign. But whatever Barre might have said, Chirac knew the game was over. To have any chance of winning he would need the support of the majority not only of Barre’s supporters but also of Le Pen’s. Arithmetically that was all but impossible.

  To Chirac’s credit, he fought on gamely ‘to preserve the future’, as he put it. But the next two weeks were a nightmare.

  Four days after the first round, he
and Mitterrand went head to head in the one televised debate of the campaign, lasting more than two hours, which was watched by 28 million people, three-quarters of the electorate. Mitterrand was on his dignity from the outset and his constant references to Chirac as ‘Mr Prime Minister’ soon got under his rival’s skin:

  CHIRAC: Allow me just to say that tonight, I am not the Prime Minister and you are not the President. We are two candidates who are equal and who are submitting ourselves to the judgement of the French people. You will permit me to call you Mr Mitterrand.

  MITTERRAND: But you are absolutely correct, Mr Prime Minister.24

  Chirac could call the President ‘Mr Mitterrand’ all he wanted. It did not make any difference. They were not at the same level.25

  The climax of the debate came shortly afterwards. Chirac recalled that in 1981, Mitterrand, as part of the traditional amnesty which followed a presidential election, had released Jean-Marc Rouillan and Nathalie Ménigon, both leading figures in the extreme left-wing group, Action Directe. Some years later they had assassinated General René Audran, the Director of International Relations at the Defence Ministry, and Georges Besse, the head of Renault.fn2 Did the President still defend such ‘an indulgent, or as one would say today, lax policy in the realm of security’?

  Mitterrand bristled. First he pointed out that Rouillan had at the time been charged only with a minor offence and that he had been freed under exactly the same conditions as those accorded in earlier amnesties by Pompidou and Giscard. Ménigon’s case was more complicated. She had faced a charge of attempted murder but had been released on medical grounds. The government had hoped that a gesture of clemency might prevent the group from becoming radicalised and spare France the cycle of repression and violence which Italy had endured at the hands of the Red Brigades. Mitterrand did not go into that. Instead, attack being the best form of defence, he lashed out:

  MITTERRAND: I have never freed terrorists. You, when you were Prime Minister [under Giscard in 1974], you freed a Japanese terrorist . . . A little later . . . you freed Abu Daoud [who had masterminded the killing of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics]. I am obliged to say that I remember the conditions under which you sent Mr Gordji back to Iran, after having explained to me, in my office, that the evidence against him was overwhelming and that his complicity in the terrorist attacks which had bloodied Paris at the end of 1986 was proven . . .

  CHIRAC: Mr Mitterrand, all of a sudden, in your concentrated fury, you have lost control of yourself . . . Look me straight in the eye and tell me, Mr Mitterrand: did I ever say to you that . . . we had proof that Gordji was guilty of complicity . . . in [these] acts? I always said that that was solely a matter for the investigating magistrate and that I did not know . . . what was in the dossier [against him] . . . Looking me in the eye, can you really contest my version of things?

  MITTERRAND: To your face, I contest it. When Gordji was arrested [and] the Iranian Embassy was surrounded, with all the consequences that had in Teheran, it was because the government had provided us with what we thought were sufficiently serious [proofs] that he was one of those behind the terrorism at the end of 1986. And you know that very well.26

  It was an electric moment. The President and Prime Minister of France were accusing each other of lying, live on television.

  Which one was telling the truth?

  Giscard said afterwards that he was sure that Chirac had been lying. ‘Whenever he was going to serve me up some story that I didn’t believe,’ he told Mitterrand later, ‘he always used to say: “I can promise you, looking you straight in the eye . . .”’ The television audience gave the President the benefit of the doubt: 42 per cent found him convincing against 33 per cent for Chirac. In fact, both had taken liberties with the truth. Pasqua had indeed told Mitterrand that Gordji was behind the terrorist attacks. But three months before the Iranian was freed, the Prime Minister had warned him that they had very little evidence which would stand up in a court of law.

  For the next week, Chirac clutched at straws. On May 4 the last three hostages in Lebanon – Marcel Carton, Marcel Fontaine and Jean-Paul Kauffmann – were finally released and flown to Paris, where the Prime Minister was once again on hand to greet them. The war with Iraq was drawing to a close. Teheran had decided that the problem with France had gone on long enough. It was later revealed that Chirac’s intermediary, a Corsican named Jean-Charles Marchiani with a somewhat chequered past, had paid the trio’s abductors a ransom of US $7 million.27

  The following day came news of a different kind. In New Caledonia, French troops had stormed a redoubt where dissident members of the FLNKS had taken twenty-three policemen hostage on the small island of Ouvéa, 80 miles north of the mainland. Chirac had approved the operation in the hope that it would win him votes from National Front supporters. The hostages were freed, but two of the rescuers died and nineteen Kanaks were killed. It was discovered later that twelve had been executed with a bullet to the head. An official report spoke of ‘acts contrary to military honour’.

  ‘Twenty-one dead!’ Mitterrand groaned. ‘Baseness, perjury and lies . . . For 100,000 votes! You don’t win votes with money and blood.’

  Then on Friday, May 6, the government announced that one of the two French agents involved in the Rainbow Warrior affair, who was completing her sentence on the French Pacific atoll of Hao, was being repatriated because she was pregnant. ‘Pregnant!’ the President exclaimed. ‘Since how many minutes?’

  None of it helped.

  On Sunday night, Mitterrand won 54 per cent of the votes, Chirac 46 per cent. It was established later that almost 20 per cent of Le Pen’s supporters had voted for Mitterrand and 14 per cent of Barre’s. The remainder went to Chirac or, in the case of the National Front, abstained. The Communists, the Greens and the extreme Left swung massively behind the President, who also outdid his rival in mobilising abstentionists from the first round. Mitterrand’s slogan, La France Unie (United France), had succeeded better than even he had hoped. It was the worst result for the Right in a presidential election since the establishment of the Fifth Republic, almost thirty years earlier.

  * * *

  fn1 Gilles Ménage wrote fifteen years later that, in March 1983, he had received a report from the DST, citing an intelligence source in Tunisia, according to which ‘the chiefs of the Iranian special services, not wanting to be implicated directly in terrorist attacks or sabotage in France, had allegedly contacted the Tunisian fundamentalist movement to employ carefully selected activists residing in France’. Ménage wrote that he had rejected the information ‘in a manner as peremptory as it was mistaken’, thinking that the Tunisians were seeking to involve France in their own internal problems. In a comment that could apply as much to the White House in its treatment of information about al-Qaeda or Downing Street about the London Underground bombings, he concluded: ‘It is one thing to obtain information and quite another to interpret it correctly.’

  fn2 General Audran was shot dead outside his home near Paris on January 25 1985, Georges Besse in similar circumstances on November 17 1986. By then Action Directe had established links with the Red Army Faction in West Germany, the Fighting Communist Cells in Belgium and dissident Palestinian groups in Lebanon. It was initially thought that both attacks, like other failed attempts to assassinate prominent French figures, were part of a strategy for West European revolution. However both Audran, who was in charge of French arms sales to Iraq, and Besse, who had headed the consortium to which Iran had made the disputed $1 billion loan, had roles which put them in conflict with Teheran. Rouillan and other members of Action Directe denied any Iranian connection, but French intelligence became convinced that Audran’s murder, and probably that of Besse as well, had been manipulated by Iran.

  14

  The Monarch

  MITTERRAND’S SECOND TERM began on a sour note. ‘I have to lance the boil,’ he told Michel Charasse. ‘But it won’t last more than six months.’

  He was re
ferring to Michel Rocard, whom he named Prime Minister on May 10, two days after the election, not because he wanted to but because he felt he had no alternative. ‘People won’t understand if I don’t give him his chance. It’s his turn,’ he told Pierre Bérégovoy, who had hoped that this time the choice might fall on him. But he observed to Attali: ‘Rocard has neither the ability nor the character for that post’.

  Mitterrand’s allergy to his new Prime Minister was intestinal. But politically he represented that ‘opening’ towards the Centre that the country seemed to want.

  There was, however, a quid pro quo . . . or rather two.

  Within the government Mitterrand surrounded Rocard with Socialist Party heavyweights loyal to himself, the ‘elephants’ as they were called: Bérégovoy, Roland Dumas, Pierre Joxe and the immovable Culture Minister, Jack Lang, all returned to the posts they had held two years earlier under Laurent Fabius. Jean-Pierre Chevènement was named Minister of Defence. Lionel Jospin became Education Minister and ranked second in the Cabinet hierarchy.

  Within the Party, Mitterrand decided, Fabius, his dauphin-in-waiting, should become First Secretary in Jospin’s place. It was the sine qua non of Rocard’s nomination, he said later. If he was going to entrust the government to someone not from his own camp, he wanted to be sure that the Socialist Party was firmly in the hands of his allies.

  But the President presumed too much.

  To many in the Party, Fabius was like Mitterrand but without his master’s charisma and charm. He was seen as cold, calculating and ambitious, with an aristocratic disdain for those he regarded as inferiors. Fabius might be on the Left, his critics argued, but if it served his ends to transform the Socialists into a French version of the US Democratic Party, a machine to win elections, without convictions and without a soul, he would not hesitate. His only interest in becoming party leader, they charged, was to add a paragraph to his résumé to further his own political career. Moreover he was not the only candidate available. Pierre Mauroy, having served as deputy party leader under both Mollet and Mitterrand was keen to have the post. The President tried to dissuade him, suggesting that he become Speaker of the National Assembly instead. But there was a spirit of revolt in the air. The antagonism between Fabius and Jospin, which had started with their dispute over precedence in the 1986 election campaign, was undiminished. Among the Party’s ‘Old Guard’, who had been with Mitterrand since the days of the Convention in the 1960s, only one, Pierre Joxe, supported Fabius. The others spoke of ‘an abuse of democracy’, a ‘monarchic’ imposition of a candidate who was not wanted. The depth of the opposition to his protégé took Mitterrand by surprise. ‘I would prefer Fabius,’ he told them. ‘But you must do as you wish. It’s not my business, it’s up to the Socialist Party.’