Mitterrand Replaces Loser Chirac With Socialist Maverick

President Francois Mitterrand on Tuesday appointed Michel Rocard, a 57-year-old Socialist maverick with a following among non-leftists, to replace Jacques Chirac as premier of France.

Rocard, a popular politician and longtime rival of Mitterrand, immediately left the president’s office at the Elysee Palace to take his new place in the premier’s office at the Hotel Matignon on the other side of the Seine River.

While the Republican Guard stood at attention, Chirac, 55, a conservative who was soundly beaten by the 71-year-old Mitterrand in Sunday’s final round of the presidential election, met Rocard at the door of the Matignon and led him to the premier’s office. The symbolic transfer of power took place there.

Chirac and Rocard, who were classmates at the prestigious Institute of Political Studies, conferred for 30 minutes, then Rocard escorted Chirac to the door. Chirac, who had resigned as premier earlier Tuesday, was then driven to his office and apartment in the luxurious City Hall; he remains mayor of Paris.

Rocard, a small man with an impish smile and an aversion to ideology, waved goodby to his predecessor and then told reporters that in mapping out his future program he intends to keep in mind “all those French who are worried, no matter how they voted.”

Mitterrand, in naming Rocard, fulfilled a campaign promise to appoint a premier who will appeal not just to the Socialists. For many years, polls have consistently rated Rocard among the most popular of French politicians, often well ahead of Mitterrand.

Rocard now faces the formidable task of putting together a government of Socialists and perhaps centrists that can govern in the face of a conservative majority in the National Assembly. The Socialists and their closest allies control only 215 of 573 seats.

Rocard must either attract enough centrist votes from the present conservative majority to forge a new majority of his own or try to rule with a minority. Under the French system, it is possible, though difficult, for a premier to rule with a minority since he does not have to ask for a vote of confidence from the National Assembly. A majority opposition, however, could try to bring him down with a vote of censure.

If Rocard finds it too difficult to work with the National Assembly, Mitterrand could dissolve it and call new elections. Many Socialists are urging him to do just that, feeling certain that the Socialists could win a majority now.

There is little doubt that Rocard intends to use his term as premier to catapult him into the presidency. “Whatever happens,” he told a newspaper recently, “I know that one day I will go to the Elysee Palace.” Many analysts had thought that this ambition might inhibit Mitterrand from appointing him. In the end, Mitterrand overcame any concerns on this score and seemed to be anointing his old rival as a kind of favored successor.

Ran for President

Rocard ran for president in 1969 as the young leader of a splinter party called the Unified Socialist Party. He won only 3.6% of the vote in the first round but drew enough attention to win a National Assembly seat a few months later. In 1974 he led his followers into the mainstream Socialist Party.

In 1981 he tried to win the Socialist Party’s nomination for president, but after a blistering attack on him by Laurent Fabius, who later became premier, Rocard stepped aside for Mitterrand. He was a candidate for president again this year but again stepped aside for Mitterrand. When he did so this time, however, it was without any sign of complaint or rancor. He campaigned enthusiastically for Mitterrand’s reelection.

Rocard’s relations with Mitterrand and the leaders of the Socialist Party were severely strained in 1985 when he resigned as minister of agriculture and left the government. He did so on the grounds that he could not accept the government’s decision to change the law to elect the National Assembly by proportional representation.

Many Socialist leaders, who have long resented him for joining the party late and then trying to take it over, did not accept his rationale. They believed that Rocard was looking for an excuse to break with an unpopular government and give himself time to map out a campaign for the presidency in 1988.

Rocard’s popularity is not easy to explain. Although he is well liked in small groups, he is not a polished speaker at rallies and large meetings. He spews out facts and ideas rapidly and sometimes swings his mouth away from the microphone at the end of a sentence, so that his main point is lost.

He is a nervous chain-smoker who seems always in a hurry. “Rocard was born a quarter of an hour late,” a friend once said, “and he has never caught up.”

But his ideas have long touched a chord among the French, who in the past decade have become less ideological and more fond of compromise. Rocard is a Socialist who prefers pragmatism to ideology and sees more value in markets than in the ideas of Karl Marx. He once called himself a “free-enterprise Socialist.”

The Socialist Party, after a disastrous, doctrinaire two years in office at the beginning of Mitterrand’s first term, finally came around to his way of thinking. Mitterrand’s speeches in the last campaign appeared to reflect, at least in part, many of Rocard’s ideas.

Son of a Physicist

Rocard, a member of the small but influential Protestant community in a largely Roman Catholic country, was born in a suburb of Paris in 1930, the son of a physicist who later helped develop France’s nuclear bomb.

Like Chirac and Fabius, he is a graduate of the elite National School of Administration that has trained many of the leading politicians and civil servants of France. He worked as an inspector in the Ministry of Finance, often regarded as the most prestigious job in the French civil service, before deciding in the late 1960s to devote himself to politics.

Mitterrand named Rocard a little more than two hours after Chirac came to the Elysee Palace and handed in his resignation, spending only 10 minutes with the president. The two men, one a Socialist, the other an orthodox conservative, had cooperated for two years in a strange double-executive system that the French call “cohabitation,” but their campaigning for the presidency ended in acrimony.

Under the French constitution, Chirac did not have to resign but he would have been breaking with tradition if he had tried to stay on. In any case, since he had been soundly defeated in the presidential election, his position would have been untenable.

Rocard is the fourth premier to serve under President Mitterrand. After taking office in 1981, Mitterrand named Socialist Pierre Mauroy as premier, replaced him with Fabius in 1984, and then, after the conservatives won the parliamentary elections of 1986, appointed Chirac, the leader of the strongest conservative party.