Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  Afterwards he blamed himself for not having insisted that the government reintroduce proportional representation. The Socialist Party leaders had refused to do so because they thought it would look like an electoral manoeuvre and it would have brought about the election of some sixty National Front MPs. ‘I should have imposed it,’ he said afterwards, ‘even against our own side . . . I should have broken [their resistance] to prevent us having to go through this.’

  But that had been the problem throughout Mitterrand’s second term. He had consistently failed to enforce his will – whether it was within the Socialist Party or within the government.

  The outcome of the second round of voting the following weekend was that the Right won 480 out of 577 seats. The Socialists had 67, less than a quarter of their strength in the outgoing parliament, and the Communists 23. Among those who lost their seats were Rocard and Jospin, the Left’s leading candidates for the presidential elections two years later. It was the most true blue, conservative parliament France had had since 1815, when Louis XVIII returned to power following the fall of Napoleon after the battle of Waterloo. Never in France in modern times had the disavowal of a ruling party been more complete.

  The election had a tragic postscript.

  On May 1 1993, Pierre Bérégovoy killed himself.

  For years afterwards, rumours would circulate about the circumstances of his death. The autopsy established that he had shot himself in the head with a pistol which his police bodyguard had left in the glove compartment of his car. Conspiracy theorists – the same people who cast doubt on the reality of Patrice Pelat’s heart attack – whispered that Mitterrand had had the former Prime Minister killed to ensure his silence, since he no doubt knew secrets which the President wished to hide.

  The truth, of course, was otherwise. Bérégovoy had been in a black depression. He blamed himself for the Socialists’ defeat. Above all, he blamed himself for having accepted Pelat’s loan which had cost him his honour. Pelat had been a generous and very wealthy friend who had helped him for years while asking nothing in return. But it had been imprudent. Bérégovoy, whose career had begun as a sixteen-year-old lathe operator in a textile factory, felt he had betrayed his class and his roots. One of his closest aides, Olivier Rousselle, remembered him repeating, over and over again, ‘Socialism is screwed in this country. We’ll never be able to lift our heads. It needs something dramatic . . . If I disappeared, that would suit everyone. That would be the act which would wash all the sins away.’ The day before he died, Michel Charasse had warned Mitterrand: ‘I’m afraid he’s going to kill himself.’ The President said he would arrange a lunch the following week. But whether because he had been through the same thing after the Observatory Affair in 1959, and thought Bérégovoy would pull through, as he himself had done, or simply because he was convinced that the former Prime Minister had nothing for which to reproach himself, he left it too late. ‘[He] was obsessed by this loan which had completely obliterated all the best side of his personality,’ the President said later. ‘He could talk of nothing else. It was as though it had paralysed him, even though he had nothing to be guilty about . . . I tried to cheer him up, telling him: “You’re exaggerating, you’re depressed. It’s a bad time but it will pass”. [But] he did not stop talking about it.’

  On May 4, a Tuesday, at the cathedral in Nevers, where Bérégovoy had been mayor, Mitterrand delivered a corrosive funeral oration, denouncing those who had hounded him to death. ‘All the explanations in the world,’ he said, his voice shaking with anger, ‘cannot justify throwing to the dogs the honour and finally the life of a man at the price of a double dereliction, on the part of his accusers, of the fundamental laws of our Republic which protect the dignity and freedom of each of us.’ His targets were the right-wing judge, Thierry Jean-Pierre, who had selectively – and illegally – leaked the results of his investigations in order to foment a smear campaign, and the journalists and editors who had abetted it without considering, or sometimes caring, whether what they wrote was true.58 But it was also a lament for a political culture in which, half a century after Gringoire and Le Crapouillot had driven Roger Salengro to suicide, depressingly little seemed to have changed.

  * * *

  fn1 A quarter of a century later, that judgement appeared to have been vindicated. By 2012, the centrist parties had all but disappeared from French politics. In that year’s parliamentary elections, they obtained four seats and less than 5 per cent of the vote. Most of the former UDF had been swallowed up by the right-wing UMP, the successor to Chirac’s RPR. French politics had become essentially bipolarised with adjuncts on the far Left and the far Right.

  fn2 In 1994, Traboulsi, who had acted as an intermediary in Pechiney’s takeover of the American company, Triangle, and Bérégovoy’s Chief of Staff, Alain Boublil, were sentenced to prison terms for insider trading. Ten years later, after one of the longest legal proceedings in French history, Soros was likewise convicted and fined 2.2 million Euros for his role in the raid on the Société Générale. Of the ten others accused in that case, eight, including Traboulsi and Dalle, were acquitted, and two benefited from an amnesty.

  fn3 France’s problems with Libya did not end there. In September 1989, nine months after the destruction of a Pan Am airliner above Lockerbie, in Scotland, in which Libya later admitted it had been involved, a plane belonging to the French airline UTA was blown up over Niger. Libya afterwards acknowledged its implication in that attack too.

  fn4 For the French Right there had been a quid pro quo. At election time, leaders like Omar Bongo in Gabon despatched emissaries with suitcases full of cash to finance the campaigns of the RPR and the UDF. It was the Gaullist version of Urbanet. Where the Socialists had taken kickbacks from corrupt public works contractors to whom their municipalities awarded contracts, the Right took kickbacks from corrupt African leaders. In return, Chirac, Giscard and their allies turned a blind eye to the dictators’ turpitude.

  fn5 In January 1999, when the time came for those members which met the Maastricht criteria to adopt the Euro, Austria and Finland, which had entered the EU in 1995, joined nine of the original Twelve in embracing the new currency. Greece was judged not to be ready. Sweden, which had joined at the same time, decided, like Britain and Denmark, to keep its own currency. It was not granted an opt-out but used a legal loophole to do so. Of the twelve new member states which had joined the EU by January 2013, five adopted the Euro while seven kept their own currencies. All except the original three holdouts – Britain, Denmark and Sweden – will be required to use the Euro as soon as they meet the entry criteria, which is expected to occur by 2020. The currency’s biggest problems to date were caused by the admission of countries which had concealed the true state of their finances. In 1999, Kohl was well aware that the Italians had falsified their accounts but insisted that, as one of the EU’s founding members, Italy must be allowed to join as a matter of European solidarity. It set a disastrous precedent. Greece, whose finances were in an even more calamitous state, was admitted two years later.

  fn6 Mitterrand’s statement was more accurate than the subsequent troubles of the Eurozone might make it appear. Within a year of the Euro first being circulated in January 2002, it exceeded parity with the dollar and has remained a stronger currency ever since, being valued at between US $1.05 and $1.61. According to the IMF, the EU’s GNP reached US $17,611 billion in 2011 compared with $15,076 billion for the United States, making it, as he had predicted, ‘the first economic power’ in the world.

  fn7 In 1999, when the case was eventually heard, Fabius and the Social Affairs Minister, Georgina Dufoix, were acquitted of all charges. The Health Secretary, Edmond Hervé, was convicted of ‘failing to observe the obligation of security or prudence’ but not sentenced, on the grounds that pre-trial publicity had affected his right to the presumption of innocence. The court noted that Fabius, against the advice of government medical specialists, had insisted in July 1985 on the immediate introduction o
f HIV testing and by so doing had probably saved hundreds of lives.

  15

  The Survivalist

  THE COHABITATION WHICH began in the spring of 1993 was very different from that seven years earlier. Then Mitterrand’s goal had been to position himself for re-election. Now his concern, cancer permitting, was to complete his second term.

  For that he needed a prime minister who, unlike Chirac, would be ready to cooperate with him, to respect his prerogatives in matters of defence and foreign policy and to avoid gratuitous clashes of authority. Barre and Giscard were possibilities. But Chirac’s RPR again formed the largest parliamentary group and logically the new prime minister should come from its ranks. Édouard Balladur, who had been Finance Minister during the first cohabitation, was the obvious choice.

  Precisely because Balladur’s nomination seemed self-evident, Mitterrand jibbed. But as with Rocard, five years earlier, he saw no alternative. ‘It was not in my interests,’ he said afterwards, ‘to oppose the trend of public opinion.’ Accordingly, the morning after the second round, he sent Védrine to meet Balladur in secret at the Plaza-Athenée hotel, a palatial establishment on the Avenue Montaigne, the other side of the Champs-Elysées. The prospective Prime Minister gave the assurances Mitterrand wished to hear. ‘I would do nothing,’ he told Védrine, ‘which might detract from the functions of the presidency.’ There would be no repetition of the Chirac years, ‘no competition between us at summit meetings . . . I will not be responsible for seeing the dignity of our country infringed. We cannot make a spectacle of ourselves and I will do what is needed to ensure that we arrive at common positions.’ On Europe they had no major disagreements. At home, he promised to try to avoid exacerbating social tensions. The fact that he did not intend to stand for the presidency in 1995 – it having been agreed that Chirac would be the RPR’s candidate – would make that easier, he said.

  That evening Mitterrand announced that he had chosen Édouard Balladur to head the new government, both for ‘his ability to unite the different elements of the majority behind him [and] for his competence’.

  The new Prime Minister was the antithesis of Chirac. Where one was brash, earthy, impetuous and trenchant, a product of Harvard and the Grandes Écoles, brimming with the energy and the appetites of a raffish country squire, the other was suave, urbane and pompous. Mitterrand had learnt to appreciate Balladur during the first cohabitation, when the Minister used to pass him caustic notes at Cabinet meetings during long-winded speeches by his colleagues. But he was as vain as a peacock, insisting on the full honours due to his station, and was depicted by cartoonists in a brocade jacket, periwig and court pumps, being carried about in a sedan chair by beribboned flunkeys.

  The following day, March 30, Balladur proposed Alain Juppé, the Secretary-General of the RPR, as Foreign Minister; Charles Pasqua at the Interior; and François Léotard, who led the Republican Party, part of the UDF, at Defence. Seven years earlier, when Chirac had put forward Léotard’s name as Defence Minister, Mitterrand had demurred. ‘He’s capable of declaring war without either of us even noticing,’ he had commented. This time he made no objection. That evening a list of thirty ministers was announced from the Elysée, among them an up and coming politician named Nicolas Sarkozy, then in his late thirties, as Minister of the Budget. Roughly half were drawn from the RPR, the remainder from the array of parties that made up the Centre-Right. At their first Cabinet meeting, on Friday, April 2 – it having been thought better to avoid April Fool’s Day – both sides emphasised harmony. They were there together, Mitterrand said, ‘because the people wished it’. It was an unusual situation, Balladur responded, ‘which in the end is becoming usual . . . All those who are here will try to make [it] work as well as possible.’

  If the President and the Prime Minister were on the way to finding a modus vivendi, that was not true within the Socialist Party. The following day, Saturday, when the Executive Committee met, the knives were out for Fabius. He had been discredited by the scandal over the contaminated blood. He had raised hackles by packing the Secretariat and key party committees with his own supporters. He had helped lead the Socialists to a disastrous defeat and now, when a mea culpa might have saved him, he insisted that he had no reason to step down because whatever might have befallen others, he had retained his parliamentary seat.

  The President’s protégé was roundly booed. That night, when the matter was put to a vote, not only Rocard and Jospin and their supporters but many of Mitterrand’s own faction joined forces against him. Fabius and his supporters were ousted and the leadership confided to a provisional directorate, headed by Michel Rocard, which was charged with preparing an emergency congress in the autumn.

  Mitterrand was furious. He was still exercised by the Socialists’ refusal to make Fabius party leader in 1988. Now, after Fabius had spent only fourteen months in the post, they had rejected him again.

  ‘Do you realise what you’ve done?’ he stormed at Claude Estier, one of his most loyal supporters. ‘You’ve given the Party to Rocard!’ Guy Mollet had used similar words, twenty-two years earlier at Épinay, when he had realised that he was losing control of the Party to Mitterrand. The President’s resentment of the former Prime Minister knew no bounds. Jean Glavany, who had been Mitterrand’s Private Secretary at the Elysée in his first term, remembered a lunch at the home of Henri Emmanuelli, another Mitterrand loyalist who lived not far from Latche, at which they had tried to persuade him to change his mind. ‘We kept telling him he was the one who had put Rocard in Matignon and that since then his criticisms of Rocard, however he phrased them, didn’t convince anyone any more. We told him that Fabius, his favourite, had screwed up as party leader . . . He went pale. He almost got up and left.’

  By the autumn, when Rocard was confirmed as First Secretary, the President was ready to declare a truce. But it was an armed stand-off, not a cessation of hostilities. The Socialist Party was in disarray. Mitterrand decided he would leave it to its own devices. He and the Party no longer had the same priorities. His overriding goal was to survive the rest of his term. He was not going to put himself out on a limb for them, least of all when they were led by a man he regarded as the bane of his existence. Instead, just as he had when Rocard had been Prime Minister, he watched, raptor-like, waiting to swoop down at the first mistake.

  Mitterrand’s influence in the final two years of his presidency was limited both by the necessity of sharing power with a right-wing government and by the cancer which was slowly destroying him.

  His one unquestioned success came on the only issue over which, perhaps not coincidentally, he engaged in a real trial of strength with Balladur’s government.

  A year earlier, in April 1992, he had written to the leaders of the four other declared nuclear powers – Britain, China, Russia and the United States – to announce that France would suspend nuclear weapons testing for a year. He had urged them to follow suit. It was a peace dividend from the end of the Cold War – each nuclear test at Mururoa cost about 100 million francs (£12 million or US $18 million) – and a recognition that the nature of the threat had changed. Rather than a nuclear conflict, Mitterrand argued, Europe was more likely to face regional wars like those in the Balkans. The French General Staff strongly disagreed. So did the right-wing parties, which claimed that a moratorium would weaken French defence. None of the other four leaders responded and by the summer Mitterrand had concluded that, as he had feared might be the case, his appeal had fallen on deaf ears.

  But then, in October, George Bush announced that the United States, too, would suspend testing. Britain followed. Russia gave a similar undertaking. The only holdout was China.

  In July 1993, three months after Balladur took office, Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, wrote to Mitterrand and, after paying tribute to the French leader’s ‘international authority and sense of History’, said he had decided that ‘a complete ban on testing would increase the security of the United States and of the world’ and ask
ed France to join America in working on a new test ban treaty. A week later, at the G7 Summit in Tokyo, Mitterrand promised his support.

  For the French Right the issue became a casus belli. Chirac attacked the President for endangering French independence and betraying the heritage of de Gaulle. At the technical level, the question was whether France could develop computer simulation and laboratory testing to a point where actual explosions became unnecessary. Mitterrand thought yes. The military thought no. But from the start the argument had been essentially political. Chirac used it to undermine Balladur, whom he was starting to see as a potential rival for the presidency, by suggesting that the Prime Minister was not tough enough to stand up to Mitterrand. The President used it as an occasion to affirm his power. At Chirac’s urging, Balladur toyed with the idea of going over Mitterrand’s head and ordering the tests to resume without the President’s agreement. He quickly realised that the army would not obey. ‘It was a classic case,’ Mitterrand said later, ‘of a situation where you can’t trigger a crisis unless you are willing to resign.’ Balladur was not. The moratorium continued until the end of Mitterrand’s second term, by which time the French Atomic Energy Commission had concluded that simulation techniques were sufficiently advanced to make further tests unnecessary.fn1

  The other key challenge which Mitterrand faced concerned Rwanda. Among those who had pledged, with varying degrees of conviction, to introduce a more democratic system after his speech at La Baule was the Rwandan President, Juvenal Habyarimana, an army officer who had seized power in a coup eighteen years earlier and headed the country’s only legal political party. In the early period of his rule, Habyarimana had pursued a policy of national reconciliation between his own dominant Hutu tribe, which made up 85 per cent of the population, and the minority Tutsis, who had been treated by the Belgian colonial administration as a privileged aristocracy. But in the 1980s Rwanda had been confronted by a collapse in the price of its main export, coffee, and a land shortage caused by a rapidly growing population. Habyarimana’s popularity had slumped. In such circumstances, Rwandan politicians returned to the one value which they knew would never let them down: ethnicity. In the 1960s and ’70s, Habyarimana’s predecessor, Grégoire Kayibanda, had rallied Hutu support by whipping up racial fears which culminated in massacres. In each case upwards of 10,000 Tutsis had died and several hundred thousand more fled into exile in Burundi, Uganda and Zaire. By 1990 the stage was set for a repetition.