Can Mitterrand Win Again?

In 1981 French conservatives thought that their world was ending because Socialist Francois Mitterrand was elected president. Now, as Mitterrand seeks to do what no other Fifth Republic president has ever done--win popular election to a second term--the French election campaign promises to be far less ideological.

That’s in part because of a mellowing of Mitterrand, now 71, casting himself for the spring election campaign in the role of an avuncular figure. “The French must come together,” he says, and avoid “excessive, intolerant people.” But political reality also plays a part: Mitterrand no longer governs alone. Instead of the strong-president government that Charles de Gaulle crafted, France is run by a strange pairing of president and premier called “cohabitation.”

What Times correspondent Stanley Meisler has described as an “odd coupling” has produced a government in which Premier Jacques Chirac, a tough-minded conservative whose party won parliamentary control two years ago, wrestles with day-to-day domestic issues while Mitterrand has the responsibility for foreign policy and defense. This division of labor has allowed Mitterrand to stay above the fray--a fray that includes everything from changes in the place of farming in the French scheme of things to a growing malaise about and among the African and Arab immigrants who flood the French job market and who remain ostracized in much of France.

The world has always been able to count on the French to discuss les idees , but these may not be ideas that the French want to face. While France does not stand today across the wide ideological trenches of its past, it is not in such agreement that it can just coast through an election without serious debate about its direction at home and abroad. There is no certainty that the French candidates--who will face the voters first on April 24 and then again in a runoff on May 8--will deliver that debate, but now with Mitterrand’s decision to run again at least the debaters are all on center stage.