Is There a Future for Union of the Left

Stuart Elliott New America May 1978

The Communist Party remains the primary obstacle to the meaningful social changes desired by the French people. This is the most striking lessons of the narrow electoral victory of the ruling coalition in the March election. The Union for French Democracy (UDF), the moderates gathered around President Giscard and Jacques Chirac’s Gaullists could not ignore the need for reforms. The acknowledged the legitimacy of the aspirations of the left while attacking the Common Program as unrealistic and the Union of the Left, because of the participation of the Communists, as unreliable and dangerous.

In truth, there was no Union of the Left. It had been destroyed by a deliberate Communist effort to restrict the growth of the Socialist Party. Still the left came within a hairsbreadth of victory. In the first round, the vote for the left (Socialists, Communists, and Left Radicals, plus the extreme left which has always stood outside the Common Program) surpassed that for the government parties, keeping alive the prospect of a slight leftist majority on the second round. The government parties squeaked through with a majority of less than 400,000 in a vote of 26 million. The gerrymandered French electoral system gave the government parties a parliamentary majority way out of proportion to their share of the popular vote. The results were far from being a vote of confidence for conservative rule.

The factors which turned the possibility of a narrow victory for the left into a narrow defeat—a continuing swing of opinion away from the left, the ability of the right to mobilize an even greater turn-out than that for the record first-round vote, and the inability of the leftist parties to switch maximal support—can be reduced to one cause: the unrelenting Communist war against the Socialists, which without justification, revived ail the old tears about the nature of the Communists.

The narrow victory of the government was by no means the only significant result of the elections. Indeed, the hardest fought and most crucial political battle was the contest between the parties of the left. The Communist-provoked breakdown of the Union of the Left in September was but the first engagement in a poorly disguised campaign to sabotage the left's chances for victory, drive votes away from the Socialists, and break the unity and will of the Socialists. Despite being caught in a pincer between the Communists and the Giscardists, the Socialists were the only party to gain votes after the first round, picking up almost four percentage points, or 2.5 million votes over their 1973 legislative results. In contrast, the Communist vote declined by almost a percentage point to 20.6 percent. Thus was accomplished a chief socialist objective—a significant realignment of popular support within the left. For the first time since World War II, the Socialists surpassed the Communists in electoral support to become the first party of the left.

Not only did the PCF concentrate it propaganda guns against the Socialists throughout the campaign, but they refused to state whether, as in all elections since 1962, their candidates would step down in constituencies where Socialists were ahead in the first round. Communist boss Georges Marchais declared that his party would respect this "republican discipline" only if the PCF gained 21 percent of the popular vote. In effect, the PCF was blackmailing those inclined to the left to vote for the Communist Party rather than the Socialists if they wanted to bring a Union of the Left government Into office. Moreover, through the first-round balloting, the Communists insisted that the withdrawal of candidates in favor of those better placed be made dependent on the outcome of full-scale negotiations between the two parties on a government program—in essence, a demand that the Socialists capitulate to the Communist terms of September. But following the first round, the Communists agreed to the Socialist position that withdrawal of candidates be based on a declaration of general principles.

Even after agreement had been reached to fight the second round together, the Communists seemed determined to do the maximum damage to the left's chances for victory. "Allies" not adversaries continued to be the targets of Le Humanite. One issue was devoted almost entirely to a vitriolic attack on Pierre Mendes-France, the respected elder statesman of the democratic left.

It is not surprising, then, that instead of the usual 90 to 95 percent, only 80 percent of the Communist vote went to the Socialists in the second round. Moreover, there appears to have been a deliberate pattern of selective abstention aimed at denying Socialist victories. Close observers noted that the stonger the local CF section, the fewer votes were transferred to Socialist candidates.

The Communists, by creating uncertainty about what would happen under a left government and by reviving fears of the party's Stalinist heritage, could hardly have designed a more effective plan to drive moderate voters away from the Socialists into the eager embrace of Giscard's centrists. Because of the understandable antipathy of pro-Socialist voters to the PCF only 60 percent, instead of the hoped-for 75 percent of the Socialist vote went to the Communist candidates who were faced by Gaullists on the second round. When given the opportunity to vote for more adequate UDF candidates, only 40 percent of the Socialist voters cast their ballots for the Communists.

Sham Conversion

In many respects, the Communists won more of their immediate objectives than any other party. Not only did the Union of the Left go down to defeat, but the Communists forestalled any dramatic erosion of their electoral strength, kept the Socialists from obtaining a clear and unmistakable dominance on the left, and preserved the option of a historic compromise with the Gaullists. The price that had to be paid to achieve these objectives may ultimately overshadow these short-term benefits. Their betrayal of the Union of the Left and the hopes of millions of French workers in the interests of narrow party advantage will be neither soon nor easily forgotten. The party's conversion to democratic values has been revealed as a sham. Its hold on large segments of the working class, though far from broken, has been loosened. The confusion and uncertainty in the party ranks produced by the switch in line in September and again following the first round have crystallized into a ferment unmatched in the party's recent history.

Shortly before the elections, Boris Kidel of the New Statesman surveyed the uneasiness in the party and concluded that "it is from the ranks of the Communist-dominatedd CGT trade unions that the most persistent signs of discontent have come. In recent elections, the CGT lost ground in such industrial strongholds as Renault, the railways, and the Paris transport services, and there are persistent reports of about 50,000 workers having left the union since Marchais broke off negotiations with the Socialists last September." The declining credibility of the PCF among workers was evident in the election returns. Le Monde's Raymond Barrillon noted that one important development during the first round was "a perceptible overall decline in Communist strength in and around Paris," traditionally a stronghold of the party. On thesecond round, some high-ranking Communist candidates, including Politburo member Jacques Chambaz, running in districts thought to be safe were defeated by a backlash against the party's attacks on the Socialists.

Since the elections, the dissatisfaction of many rank-and-file Communists has burst through the party's secretiveness into public view. Although it is difficult to gauge the extent of the criticism, it appears to be serious, particularly since it seems to come not only from intellectuals, but also from some workers' sections. More than a dozen pamphlets attacking the Communist leadership are being circulated by Communist university students, intellectuals, and lower-ranking officials. Numerous letters from Communist dissidents to Le Monde and other non-Communist newspapers have attacked the Communist leadership in terms that parallel the Socialist analysis. For the time being, the dissidents are staying in the party hoping either that the Political Bureau will respond to their activities by changing the party line or that they can somehow provoke a severe internal party crisis that will necessitate a change. While the PCF is not about to undergo a real and thorough democratization and will probably not be decisively weakened by the present upheaval, these developments do indicate that the party machinery is not totally invulnerable to the currents of reform which exist within it.

The Communists may have also unwittingly contributed to the adoption of a more mature and realistic policy by the still-growing Socialist Party. The overwhelming majority of Socialists are deeply embittered by the Communist treachery. The Executive Bureau of the Socialist Party, in a post-election statement, declared that the defeat and disunity of the left was "deliberately provoked by the leadership of the Communist Party," said that Marchais had "helped the right and postponed the hour of change," and called upon workers "to draw the proper lesson from that behavior."

The elections should encourage the Socialists to adopt a new strategic and tactical flexibility. Three broad options would appear to be open:first, to attempt to reconstruct the Union of the Left around a revised Common Program (the course favored by the left-wing CERES group which represents perhaps 25 percent of the membership); second, an independent program possibly supplemented by an electoral agreement with the Communists; and third, a center-left alliance with Giscard's UDF.

Tactical Differences

This last alternative has gained a certain plausibility. For the first time under the Gaullist constitution there is a possibility of a parliamentary majority without the Gaullists or the Communists. There are indications that a Giscard-Socialist alliance could win wide popular support. One pre-election poll showed that 62 percent of the French would like to see such an alliance. Nonetheless, a centrist-Socialist rapprochement, as the Economist acknowledged, is "still some way off." Some of Giscard's advisors are serious about the idea of constructing a center-left alliance capable of changing France, and they have urged some far-reaching reforms. But others, probably more numerous and influential, advocate delay, based on the expectation that defeat will splinter the Socialist Party and force its most moderate element into an alliance with Giscard. These tactical differences reflect the political divergences within Giscard's UDF, which is not really a party but rather a loose amalgam of moderate conservatives, centrists, and moderate reformists. A substantial portion of the UDF, in fact, would probably prefer to govern with the Gaullists.

Moreover, the sincerity of Giscard s vague proposals for a center-left alliance is open to question. Many feel that his interest in reform is a matter of style, not substance. His post-election overture to the left was extremely limited, restricted as it was to a proposal for "reasonable coexistence" between the government and the opposition. After visiting Giscard, Mitterrand said that the President's desire for "reasonable coexistence" could be achieved by applying new democratic standards to daily political life. A center-left coalition can become a serious possibility only if Giscard not only pushes for these changes, but also proposes significant social reforms, abandons the economic policy of austerity, and secures a return to proportional representation over the opposition of his Gaullist allies. As a more moderate response to the challenge of the left defined Giscard's principal difference with his Gaullist rival Jacques Chirac, there is reason to suspect that the opening to the left may be more a maneuver for dominance within the governmental majority than a definitive in-S itiative that offers any real prospect for the construction of a broad liberal-social democratic coalition. In addition, by dangling the prospect of a center-left government, Giscard may hope to immobilize, if not split, the Socialists. Like the Communists, Giscard would like to remove the threat of continuing Socialist growth by encouraging a split into left and right wings.

The very real possibility that a turn to the center might create a disastrous split is only one of the many reasons that the Socialists will be reluctant to reverse course. To do so would open the party to the charge of opportunism and give credibility to the Communist charge that all along it was the Socialists who were betraying the Union of the Left. Moreover, the last time the Socialists adopted a centrist strategy, in the 1969 presidential campaign of Gaston Deferre, it proved an electoral disaster.

While a center-left coalition sometime in the future cannot be precluded, the Socialists may well find it much more attractive to adopt a position that emphasizes their independence from both the Communists and the Giscardists. A majority of Socialists are probably not wedded to the Common Program and the Union of the Left, that is a programmatic rather than electoral agreement with the Communists. They are not likely, however, to repudiate the principles that have been largely responsible for the revitaliza-tion of the party since 1969, tripling their share of the vote, uniting nearly the entire French democratic left, and reversing the image of stagnation and decline that the non-Communist left parties had gained during the 1950s and 1960s. Those principles have been that the Socialists should normally have a left rather than center orientation, should offer a program of fundamental rather than incremental social change, and that their strategies and tactics should enable them to capture votes that had gone to the Communists. At the same time, the Socialists have to recognize the flaw in their strategy—the assumption and hope that the Comnmunists would accept the condition required for a victory of the Union of the Left: the growth of the Socialists.

For the immediate future, the Socialists have two pressing problems—holding the party together and capitalizing on the disillusionment of the left electorate with the Communists. They must find a way to consolidate and build upon their rapid growth over the past decade. This means, on the one hand, accelerating the realignment within the left by demonstrating that their commitment to change and social justice is both militant and genuine and, on the other, extending their appeal to the moderate voters who switched to Giscard at the last moment. Freed of what one leading Socialist called the "strait jacket" of the Common Program, the Socialists may now be able to develop a realistic and far-reaching program to transform French society, a program capable of rallying the millions of voter who want change but fear the Communists and the millions who incorrectly believe that change can best be achieved by a vote for the Communists.

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