Conservatives Chirac, Barre Vie : Campaign in France Focuses on 2nd Place

All the excitement in the current French presidential elections campaign centers on second place. Premier Jacques Chirac and former Premier Raymond Barre, two conservatives, are jostling each other, gingerly and gently, in a tight race for the chance to face and, if polls are right, lose to Socialist President Francois Mitterrand in a runoff.

Two men could hardly be more different than Chirac and Barre. French newspapers like to call the campaign a race between the tortoise (Barre) and the hare (Chirac). But, though the La Fontaine fable may prove prophetic in the end, other animal imagery probably underscores the differences better.

Tall, lithe, energetic, rushing and sometimes heedless, the 55-year-old Chirac lopes like a cheetah. Heavy-set, slow-moving, thoughtful, measured, and professorial, the 63-year-old Barre lumbers like a bear.

Barre’s supporters have no trouble with this kind of imagery. They even sell a key chain with a fat, cuddly bear and the motto “Barre, Confidence.” The Barre campaign is designed to make him look presidential. Solidity, slowness, sureness all seem right for this image. But, while Barre acts more and more like a president during the campaign, Chirac acts more and more like a candidate, and that may count for more.

Mitterrand Yet to Announce

The 71-year-old Mitterrand has still not announced that he is a candidate for reelection. But no one doubts that announcement will come soon, probably next week. The big question for Chirac and Barre is whether the excitement over Mitterrand’s official entry into the race will change their fortunes, either for the better or worse.

According to the latest polls, Chirac will edge past Barre into second place in the first round of voting on April 24 and thus face the first-place Mitterrand in the second round runoff May 8. Yet the polls also show that Barre, if he made it to the second round, would do slightly better against Mitterrand than Chirac.

A few months ago, the polls showed Chirac trailing Barre. But a slick campaign, obviously designed to erase his strident image and make him seem calm and congenial, has propelled Chirac forward. His campaign rallies, in fact, look more like a televised round-table than old fashioned stumping. He is obviously trying to break the traditional, platitudinous pattern of French politicking.

In the town of Evry, just south of Paris, for example, a moderator and a panel of five townspeople lobbed questions the other night at the relaxed premier who replied glibly and happily. Although most of the questions amounted to the softest of softballs, the performance had an air of spontaneity. Chirac sounded confident, thoughtful, reasonable and authoritative.

De Gaulle’s Political Heir

Chirac heads the right-wing party Rally for the Republic, which regards itself as a Gaullist party following the political philosophy of the late President Charles de Gaulle. Although Chirac’s strategists obviously believe that he can win the presidency if he manages to unite all rightist voters behind him, the premier, in the campaign, insists that he, unlike Mitterrand, has the appeal and approach to rally French voters of all political stripes around him.

“The cleavage of left versus right has always been pushed in this country by the left, not us,” Chirac told one of his questioners. “That is natural, for they are the people of ideology.”

For the last week, Chirac also has been trying to convince voters that only his election guarantees political stability and continuity in France. A vote for Mitterrand, Chirac insists, would be a sign that the voters wanted Socialist policies again. For that reason, the conservative majority in the National Assembly, according to Chirac, would refuse to cooperate with Mitterrand and his choice of premier, thus forcing new parliamentary elections.

That, of course, raises an obvious question. Chirac, after the conservatives won control of the National Assembly in 1986, agreed then to cooperate with Mitterrand and serve as a conservative premier with a Socialist president in a strange double executive system that the French now call cohabitation. Why, if that was acceptable in 1986, is it so terrible in 1988? The question, however, is not raised by the panelists at Chirac rallies.

A Kind of Primary

For Chirac and Barre, the first round of voting amounts to a kind of primary, but, unlike an American primary, these two conservative candidates try hard not to attack each other very obviously. Barre does make references here and there to Chirac’s inconsistencies, but the allusions, though clear, are circumspect. The two conservatives are too fearful of losing each other’s supporters in the second round of voting.

Although he is falling behind, Barre, who is the candidate of a center-right confederation founded by former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, has refused so far to compromise his stolid image. Barre was premier of France under Giscard d’Estaing and his strategists assume that he is well known and that any attempt to tamper with his image would backfire. A Barre leaflet states simply that he is “solid as a rock.”

As a result of this strategy, his speeches are long and heavy, his posters dull and dreary. The only comical moments at his rallies come from a clever documentary that belittles Mitterrand. The title of the film is “Mitterrand II, the Impossible Return.”

At a rally at Le Bourget airport north of Paris last week, Barre seemed ready to take his gloves off. Barre noted that he had always opposed cohabitation and was not one of those who supported it in 1986 but suddenly found it intolerable in 1988. Barre did not mention Chirac by name, but everyone knew whom he was talking about.