Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  He was more shaken than he allowed it to appear.

  That afternoon he telephoned Jospin: ‘I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,’ he said. ‘My plan is to have you in government and Fabius at the head of the Party. As you well know, this isn’t some spur-of-the-moment decision that I’ve just dreamed up. If it doesn’t go through like that, you should be aware that I will cut the umbilical cord with the Party.’

  Two days later, on Friday, May 13, when the members of the ‘Mitterrandist’ faction of the Executive Committee met to choose their candidate, Fabius was defeated by 63 votes to 54. Next day the full Committee confirmed Mauroy as party leader.

  For the first time since 1971, Mitterrand had lost control of the Party he had spent so much effort putting together. The core around which it had been built – the alliance between the ‘sabras’ and the ‘Old Guard’ – had fissured. It would mark the beginning of a long period of Socialist decline.

  One more task remained before the new team could start work.

  Immediately after his victory, Mitterrand had decided to dissolve parliament and call legislative elections. It was a gamble. He had told his old ally, the Left-Radical leader, Maurice Faure, the previous autumn:

  Either I dissolve,. . . but then I risk losing everything and finding myself with the same balance of forces in parliament, in other words a right-wing majority, which would wipe out my victory – each one would go back to his own vomit, it would be the worst of all situations. Or I try to break up the Right, but political boundaries are always slow to rebuild. At the beginning the French would approve . . . But if I take that road, there’s a big risk of bogging down.1

  Had he been re-elected by a narrow margin, he would probably have left parliament as it was. But Mitterrand reasoned that the landslide which had given him a second term had generated sufficient momentum to produce a solid majority in the government’s favour.

  The Centrists had tried to dissuade him. Jacques Chaban-Delmas told Mitterrand he had ‘a historic chance’ to bring the French together. ‘You can make 120 or 130 MPs switch sides, and the UDF and the RPR will explode,’ he said.2 Pierre Mehaignerie, the leader of Raymond Barre’s followers within the UDF, thought ‘60 or 70 MPs and 110 Senators’ would be willing to join a grand coalition of the Centre and the Left if Mitterrand gave the lead.

  Once new elections had been called, that scenario was ruled out. The centrist parties’ survival depended on their concluding electoral pacts with the Right. Any overture to the Left became impossible. For both sides it would now be a straightforward battle between Left and Right. Had Mitterrand accepted the implications of his decision, his gamble might have paid off. Instead he muddied the waters.

  On Whit Sunday, which that year fell on May 22, he made, as every year, a pilgrimage to the hill of Solutré, a rocky bluff looking out over the vineyards of Burgundy, near Danielle’s family home at Cluny. The tradition had started in 1946 as an annual reunion of members of the Resistance. After 1981 it had become an occasion for an informal conversation with journalists. That afternoon, in an attempt to reassure moderate voters, he said he wanted a Socialist victory because it would make it easier for him to open the door to the Centre, as he had done in 1981 when the Socialists had had an absolute majority but had nonetheless formed a coalition with the Communists. ‘It’s not healthy that just one party governs,’ he added. ‘Political families of other persuasions need to share in governing too.’

  In the following morning’s newspapers, the first part of his statement was forgotten. The headlines said it was wrong for a single party to have a monopoly of power. What came across – although it was not what Mitterrand had said and certainly not what he intended – was that he did not want the electorate to give the Left a large parliamentary majority.

  Whether because of these remarks, or because, after two years of cohabitation, the French had decided they rather liked a balance of power between Executive and Legislature, or simply because the Socialists ran a lacklustre campaign, reflected in a record abstention rate, the results were a cruel disappointment.3 Mitterrand had been banking on the Socialists getting about 300 seats, a dozen or so more than the absolute majority. In the event they won 276, 13 fewer than they needed.4 The Communists obtained 25 seats, 10 fewer than in the outgoing parliament; the right-wing parties and their affiliates, 273 seats; while the National Front was wiped out by the first-past-the-post constituency system, which Chirac’s government had restored, obtaining only one seat despite having nearly 10 per cent of the vote.

  It was better than the ‘worst of all situations’ which Mitterrand had envisaged with Maurice Faure, eight months earlier. But without an overall majority, the Socialists were too weak to reach out to the Centre in anything more than symbolic fashion.

  Five weeks after a triumphal re-election, Mitterrand found himself with a Prime Minister – Michel Rocard – whom he cordially detested; a leader of the Socialist Party – Pierre Mauroy – who had been elected against his wishes; and a parliament so divided that each time the government wanted to pass legislation the Socialists would have to form a temporary alliance with the Communists or parts of the Centre-Right. It was a lot of stumbles in a short time.

  Could it have been otherwise?

  In the case of the Party, yes. Mitterrand had taken it for granted that the Socialists would do his bidding. Had he brought Mauroy, Fabius and Jospin together, spelt out what he wanted and put his own authority on the line, he would have been obeyed. Instead he told them it was their choice, allowing Jospin to say – truthfully – that the President did not want to get involved.

  In part it was the sin of hubris. Mitterrand had been dazzled by the extent of his own victory, which he had obtained single-handed while keeping the Socialists offstage. If they were now back in power, they had him to thank for it. What right did they have to object to the dispositions he proposed? In part it was the old problem of Mitterrand’s conception of the presidency. As Head of State, it was not his role to interfere in the day-to-day workings of a political party, even his own. In part it was his character. In domestic affairs – though not in foreign policy – ambiguity was always preferable to clarity. The reason was disarmingly simple: at home he could be himself, which meant he could duck and weave and tergiversate as he liked. Abroad he represented France, which meant he had to be straightforward.

  Afterwards Mitterrand felt humiliated, complaining that he was being treated as a lame duck. ‘They’re dismembering my corpse and I’ve only just arrived,’ he fumed. ‘And those who were supposed to be closest to me were the ones who held the knives!’ There was truth in that. But he could hardly blame those around him for thinking about his succession when he did so ceaselessly himself. He had wanted Fabius as party leader not simply as a counterweight to Rocard but to test the waters for the next presidential contest in seven years’ time.

  With hindsight his decision to call a snap election was probably correct. ‘Are you sure,’ he asked his ministers afterwards, ‘that we would have had a [better] result if we had waited a few more months?’ Everything in Mitterrand’s experience told him that the centrist parties could not be relied upon. When push came to shove, they always threw in their lot with the Right.fn1 But the President’s refusal to campaign – he preferred to remain above the fray in the interests of an ‘opening’ which never came – was a mistake which cost his camp dear.

  The outcome was a government that was neither fish nor fowl.

  After the post-election reshuffle, Rocard found himself with forty-nine ministers, a record under the Fifth Republic. Half, on Mitterrand’s instructions, were non-Socialists, among them six members of the UDF, including four who had been ministers under Giscard, recruited against the former President’s wishes, and almost a dozen ‘obscure personalities and media celebrities’, as one historian put it, whose presence Mitterrand intended ‘to show that the [Left] is not sectarian since it is governing with others’. The Socialist Party was not at all happy
. ‘Don’t tell anyone I’m a Socialist because [if they don’t know] I might have a chance of becoming a minister,’ one party stalwart commented acidly.5 It was not the ‘opening’ that the French had hoped for.

  A year later, France was to celebrate the bicentenary of the Revolution. The G7 summit, which it was Mitterrand’s turn to host, was convened to coincide. Neither the Americans nor the British realised the significance of the date, July 14 1989, and the French were careful not to mention that Heads of State from developing countries would also be invited. The symbolism was irresistible. Two hundred years after the storming of the Bastille, the leaders of the sans-culottes in the Third World would come to Paris as equal partners to attend the rich world’s feast.

  London and Washington, once they realised what was afoot, suggested changing the dates.6 ‘Human rights did not start in France,’ Thatcher told Le Monde. ‘For me, a British Conservative, the French Revolution was a utopian attempt to overthrow the old order . . . anticipating in large part the still more terrible Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.’ In the end they came. But, like the extravaganza Mitterrand had organised seven years earlier at Versailles, the 1989 summit was rich in spectacle, short on substance. Half a million people lined the streets of Paris to watch the celebrations, which were broadcast live all over the world. The leaders of the industrialised countries, including for the first time George Bush, who had succeeded Reagan in January, approved new debt relief measures for the world’s poorest countries. But that was as far as it went. Mitterrand’s proposal that formal North–South summit talks should resume, on the model of Cancun, was heard out in silence and instantly dropped.

  The Paris summit would be the last of its kind. As the Heads of State and government savoured a barigoule d’artichaut et homard amid the nineteenth-century splendour of the Musée d’Orsay, a new revolution, as far-reaching as that in France two centuries before, was brewing in the world outside. The Soviet empire, with its roots in the Tsarist conquest of Central Asia and the Caucasus and Stalin’s expansion into Eastern Europe after the Second World War, was beginning to crack apart.

  It had started with Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika.

  Not only had they brought an upsurge in ethnic tensions within the Soviet Union but they had weakened the hold on power of the national communist parties in all the satellite states. The first reports of unrest in Armenia and Azerbaijan, of strikes in Poland and anti-government demonstrations in Budapest and in Prague, a year earlier, were no more than straws in the wind. But in the West they had aroused disquiet. ‘There is a risk of disorder in the Soviet empire,’ Mitterrand had told the French Defence Council. ‘For us, that disorder is probably not better than the order that has reigned there up to now.’

  The other Western leaders shared that view.

  Mitterrand, Thatcher, Reagan and Bush, even Helmut Kohl, whose nation, divided between the two blocs, was most directly affected, were torn by conflicting impulses. On the one hand, the changes in the East were positive. On the other they foreshadowed a potentially enormous shift in the geopolitics of Europe, which was inherently destabilising. A juggernaut had been set in motion, with unpredictable consequences. The one consolation, they all thought, was that it would happen gradually. Even if the Soviet empire was doomed to disintegrate, Mitterrand argued, it would take ‘something of the order of a generation’.

  Moreover the changes brought opportunities as well as alarm. Each one wanted his or her country to reap the benefits. A race began to see who would be boldest in challenging the established norms. ‘We must return in force to Eastern Europe,’ Mitterrand told the French Cabinet. Soon afterwards he met the Czech dissident, Václav Havel, newly released from prison in Prague. Thatcher went one better, visiting Lech Wałe˛sa – the leader of the banned Polish trade union, Solidarność – at the Gdansk shipyards. Both were ‘firsts’ by Western leaders.

  Yet at the same time they all worried that the forces which Gorbachev had unleashed would eventually unseat him, and that the pendulum in Moscow would swing back to repression and confrontation. In New York in September 1988, Mitterrand confided his misgivings to Ronald Reagan. It was ‘a very natural temptation’, he said, for countries like Hungary and Poland to want to recover their freedom, but ‘we must be prudent in encouraging [them] politically to assert themselves’ because otherwise ‘Mikhail Gorbachev will be in great difficulty’. To the Turkish Prime Minister, Turgut Ozal, later that year, he was even more explicit. ‘The awakening of the different nationalities’, he said, was ‘an enormous obstacle’ to Gorbachev and might cause him to fail. ‘We must follow with the greatest attention what is happening in the [Soviet] republics . . . The fault line is already there.’

  The Soviet leader himself gave no sign of such doubts but on the contrary forged ahead with ever greater determination. He consolidated his hold on power, becoming President, as well as party leader, and that winter amended the constitution to permit the first multi-candidate elections to the Soviet parliament. The following spring Hungary and Poland adopted multi-party systems, presaging the end of communist rule.

  But the catalyst for the biggest change of all passed completely unnoticed.

  On Tuesday, May 2 1989, Hungarian border guards began dismantling the electrified fence which, twenty years earlier, had replaced the minefields along the border with Austria. There was a technical explanation: the alarm system was so old that every time there was a storm it had to be switched off. The guards were told it needed to be replaced. But there was also a political reason. The reformists in the leadership in Budapest had decided to start removing the barriers that cut off Hungary from the West.

  Two and a half weeks later, Mitterrand met George Bush at his summer retreat at Kennebunkport in Maine. The USSR and Germany were at the centre of their concerns. As the transcript of their conversation makes clear, neither had any idea that, even as they spoke, the Iron Curtain, rung down by Stalin fifty years earlier, was being stealthily raised:

  MITTERRAND: The [West German] Social Democrats are idealistic demagogues. They want an agreement allowing German reunification. They are deluding themselves . . . The Soviets will never agree to that . . .

  BUSH: As President of France, are you for [reunification]?

  MITTERRAND: I’m not against it, given the changes that are happening in the East. If the German people want it, we won’t oppose it. But the conditions are not yet [ripe]. I don’t believe [they will be] for another ten years. [The Russians] will oppose it to the end, by force. There are only two possible causes of war in Europe: if West Germany gets nuclear weapons or if there’s a people’s movement pushing for the reunification of the two Germanies.7

  Helmut Kohl did not know what was afoot either. But his intuition was more finely tuned. In the middle of June, less than four weeks after Mitterrand’s conversation with Bush, Gorbachev visited Bonn. From his talks with the Soviet leader, Kohl said later, he sensed that Moscow’s attitude to Germany was changing.

  By then rumours had begun spreading on the East German grapevine that border controls between Hungary and Austria might be relaxed. Hundreds of East German ‘tourists’, mainly young people, started camping out on the Hungarian side. On 19 August, the authorities in Budapest made known unofficially that those who wished to leave might do so.8 Several hundred East Germans entered Austria that day. A hundred thousand more would follow in the next two and a half months, heading for West Germany. In October, another exit route opened via Czechoslovakia. When the ageing East German leadership – the most resistant to reform in Eastern Europe – complained that their Warsaw Pact allies were doing nothing to help, Gorbachev warned icily: ‘Life punishes those who react late.’ East Germany’s problems, he said, must be resolved by the East German leaders themselves.

  On the night of November 9 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.

  Throughout the West, it was a time of euphoria. To Mitterrand, it was a time of peril. He was convinced that if the Germans pushed for reuni
fication, Gorbachev’s days were numbered. When Rocard spoke enthusiastically of peace having been restored in Europe, the President exploded: ‘Peace! How can he talk of peace? It’s just the opposite that awaits us! . . . Gorbachev will never agree to go further and if he does, he’ll be replaced by a hardliner. These people don’t realise, but they are playing with world war.’9

  To a greater or lesser extent, the rest of the G7 shared his fears.

  During the Paris summit, four months earlier, Attali had noted in his diary: ‘All of them think that in Moscow Gorbachev will fail and that the most hard-line communists will return to power.’ Now Mitterrand told the Cabinet: ‘Gorbachev cannot withstand the deterioration of his country’s economy, tensions among the [Soviet] nationalities, loss of influence over his satellites and the calling into question of treaties and borders, all at the same time. To ask him to do that is to ensure his downfall.’