Parliamentary Election Called by Mitterrand

President Francois Mitterrand, buoyed by his enormous reelection victory of a week ago, dissolved the French National Assembly on Saturday and set June parliamentary elections that could regain the majority for his Socialist Party.

Speaking in a three-minute address to the nation on television, the 71-year-old Mitterrand said that he had decided to call the elections because his new premier, Michel Rocard, had informed him “that despite his efforts, he did not believe he could bring together a solid and stable majority that all governments need to carry out their programs well.”

Mitterrand said that Rocard had wanted to fulfill Mitterrand’s campaign promise of creating a government with an “opening” to the center--a government that embraced politicians of the center as well as the left. But, while trying to form his government, Rocard met a mainly negative response from centrists, the president said.

“The opening that I sought could not be brought about to the extent that I wished,” Mitterrand said. “Therefore, it was my duty to draw the appropriate conclusions. A few seconds ago, I signed a decree dissolving the National Assembly.”

Mitterrand said that the election would be held in two rounds of voting, June 5 and 12. A poll published in the Journal du Dimanche today estimated that the Socialists would take 41% of the vote in the first round, enough to enable them, after two rounds, to win a majority of the 577 seats in the assembly, which is now controlled by a conservative majority.

Cries of Anger and Anguish

The convoking of elections drew immediate cries of anger and anguish from center-right politicians like former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, who had tried to head off early elections by promising to restrain their opposition to the future legislative proposals of Mitterrand and Rocard.

But, faced with a National Assembly in the hands of conservatives who seized the majority from the Socialists in 1986 elections, Mitterrand and Rocard wanted more than passive opposition; they wanted active support from some part of the center-right, a support symbolized by some prominent center-right politicians joining the Rocard government.

But none of these politicians would do so. After working so closely with rightists like former Premier Jacques Chirac, whom Mitterrand defeated in the presidential election, these politicians apparently could not bring themselves to support Mitterrand so quickly.

One French analyst said that Mitterrand and Rocard had been unrealistic in expecting the centrists to move toward them right away.

Recriminations started immediately, with Socialists accusing the centrists of refusing the hand proffered by Mitterrand and centrists accusing the Socialists of not offering any real hand at all.

Contrary to Promises’

Obviously angry in a television interview, Pierre Mehaignerie, a leader of the Christian Democrats within former President Giscard d’Estaing’s loose confederation known as the Union for the French Democracy, said that the calling of elections was “contrary to the campaign promise of Mitterrand to unite and rally the French people.”

Giscard d’Estaing, in a letter to Mitterrand, said the nation’s central problem was trying to encourage non-Socialist and Socialist politicians to work closely together. The call for elections, the former president insisted, would make that more difficult.

“How can we achieve this if the first decision, before any attempt to work together, is to send the two camps face to face against each other in every electoral district in France,” he said.

The election call clearly caught the conservatives in disarray, smarting over their presidential defeat and unsure how to regroup for the future.

Chirac’s rightist party, the Rally for the Republic, is divided over whether to try to form electoral alliances with extreme rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen and his anti-immigrant National Front or to reject them altogether. The Union of the French Democracy, which supported former Premier Raymond Barre in the first round of the presidential election and Chirac in the runoff, is divided over whether to oppose the Socialists or join them in the parliamentary elections.

Threat of Being Squeezed Out

Many analysts believe that the centrists will be badly beaten in the parliamentary elections unless they swallow their present anger and form an electoral alliance with the Socialists. Otherwise, according to the prevailing view, they will be squeezed out by the Socialists on one side and an alliance of the right-wing and the extreme right on the other.

According to the polls, many French would welcome an alliance between such politicians as Mehaignerie or Giscard d’Estaing and the Socialists. This idea has become so prevalent that it has spawned a subtle change in political description. For years, analysts used to describe politicians like Giscard d’Estaing, Barre and Mehaignerie as moderate rightists or center-right. But now everyone is calling them centrists.