French President ‘Plugged-In’ : TV Shows Help Mitterrand Mold Image

As the interviewer stood at a lectern and looked down at him, President Francois Mitterrand of France sat stiffly, smiling wanly. He was as nervous as a contestant on a television quiz show.

One of the first questions from the interviewer, a popular television anchor named Yves Mourousi, was tricky. Mourousi wanted to know if Mitterrand regarded himself as a chebran president.

Some fashionable Frenchmen like to take two-syllable words and change the order of the syllables, a practice that makes for a sort of pig Latin. In this case, Mourousi had taken the French word branche , which means plugged-in, and turned it around. He was asking Mitterrand if he regarded himself as a plugged-in president.

Mitterrand quickly replied: “You know, when I was a child, we would reverse the order of syllables in words. There’s nothing new about doing that. You are asking me, of course, if I am plugged in. I don’t want to act like a know-it-all. I am not very well informed on this, but your use of the expression ‘plugged-in’ is already old hat. You should have asked if I was ‘cabled’ ” (hooked up for cable television).

Rapid-Fire Questions

For more than an hour and a half, millions of Sunday-night television viewers were treated to the spectacle of their usually dignified and distant president replying to a myriad of rapid-fire questions on such topics as the commercial sponsoring of sports, the robotization of industry, the Paris-Dakar auto race, the African famine, losses of the government-owned Renault auto company, the high rate of unemployment, the controversial design of a new structure at the Louvre museum, the taste in clothing of his minister of culture.

To spice up the evening, Mourousi interspersed his questions with film clips, documentary photos and false news announcements.

Mitterrand was even asked what he thought of a popular television show in which French political figures are satirized by puppets much like those on the Muppet Show. The show portrays Mitterrand as Kermit the Frog. Raymond Barre, a former premier who is a leading conservative opponent of Mitterrand, takes the form of a huge teddy bear.

Mitterrand said he was envious of Barre.

Bears and Frogs

“He is lucky to be a bear,” Mitterrand said. “What little child has never had a bear? Being a bear can help your popularity. A frog is a much less popular toy, as you know, except when it turns into a prince.”

With polls indicating that a majority of the French electorate is dissatisfied with Mitterrand’s performance as president, it seems clear that he submitted to the unusual interview with Mourousi in an effort to improve his image. French officials have been ecstatic about the results.

“He has reached important groups that he was not able to reach before, like the youth of France, the women,” an official close to Mitterrand said. “And did you notice the ratings? They kept going up throughout the evening. That means that people who sat down to watch did not leave but kept on watching. It was remarkable.”

According to the official, Mitterrand did not know what would be asked in the interview. Mourousi had met with Mitterrand some time earlier, the official said, but only to set down the “rules of the game.”

Man of the People

More is in store for a French public used to seeing the intellectual and philosophical president reply to most questions with long, well-reasoned discourses enhanced by meaningful quotations from great writers.

Another television channel scheduled a documentary about Mitterrand that makes him seem more a man of the people. For months last year and this year, a television team was at his side, filming him at work and at leisure. The producers included a good deal of serious interviewing in their film, which also shows Mitterrand at a picnic, hiking, fishing and at breakfast with his family in the apartment he still keeps on a small street in the university quarter of Paris.

Mitterrand and his staff at the Elysee Palace have obvious reasons for making him available for television shows calculated to change his image. All the polls indicate a persistent lack of popularity for the president and a near-certainty that his Socialist Party will lose control of the National Assembly in next year’s elections.

A change of presidential image could help the Socialists limit their losses and, especially under a new system of proportional representation, prevent the two main conservative opposition parties from winning a majority of the seats in the assembly. And even if the assembly should be controlled by the right, a new image of Mitterrand as a less remote and ideological president might make it easier for him to deal with the assembly and run the country in the last two years of his firstseven-year term. Also, he and his advisers may be looking ahead to his campaign for reelection in 1988.

The importance of image has been driven home in the Elysee Palace by the consistent high ratings of Mitterrand’s 38-year-old protege, Premier Laurent Fabius. Fabius, who has been in office less than a year, enhanced his popularity recently by donning a flight suit and helmet before television cameras and flying in a French jet fighter.

As might be expected, Mitterrand’s attempt to alter his image by means of television has been denounced by his opponents as a political spectacle. But there has been some grudging admiration in the criticism.

Thierry Saussez, a communications consultant who works for conservative politicians, said that Mitterrand’s performance on television lacked balance because there was so much fluff and so little substance. But he added:

“Perhaps we are seeing the start of a new and creative political use of television. If this is the start of something new, it will be interesting.”