French Conservatives Join Le Pen in Election Effort

Conservatives, turning aside warnings that they were trading their souls for a handful of votes, joined forces with extreme rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen in France’s second largest city Tuesday in hopes of staving off defeat by the Socialists in Sunday’s final round of the French parliamentary elections.

Even while protesting that there was no agreement, the conservatives, in one district in the key electoral battleground of Marseilles, withdrew all five candidates who had fallen behind a Le Pen candidate in the first round of voting last Sunday. In exchange, Le Pen and his National Front withdrew all eight candidates who had fallen behind a conservative in another Marseilles district.

This maneuver was so embarrassing to many conservatives that Jean Claude Gaudin, the conservative leader in Marseilles, did not officially announce it until a few minutes after the end of the main French television evening news shows.

But the announcement did not surprise anyone. Throughout the day, conservatives repeatedly denied any “national agreement” with Le Pen and rationalized what was obviously going on by calling it “a local matter” or a series of individual decisions taken by individual candidates.

Gaudin even insisted later that none of the withdrawn conservative candidates had stood any chance of winning in Sunday’s vote. Yet one of the conservatives who pulled out had finished only 23 votes behind the Le Pen candidate in the first round.

Socialists were quick to aggravate the embarrassment of many moderate conservatives who have long denounced Le Pen and the racist overtones of his campaigning. Former Premier Pierre Mauroy, now general secretary of the Socialist Party, denounced the arrangement in Marseilles as “villainous and unacceptable.” Socialist Minister of Education Lionel Jospin derided the mutual help of the conservatives and extreme-rightists as “a shameful form of alliance.”

The dealing in Marseilles even drew a sharp rebuke from Michel Noir, who had been minister of commerce in the conservative government of former Premier Jacques Chirac. “For three to four seats that our friends in Bouches-du-Rhone (the Marseilles area) hope to save, we are risking 60 or 70 seats in France that could be ours,” Noir said in a radio interview.

Noir, whose father was an inmate of a Nazi German concentration camp during World War II, has long warned conservatives not to deal with an extreme rightist like Le Pen. Some of his admonitions, especially a moralistic warning that “it was better to lose an election than your soul,” irritated Chirac in his recent losing campaign for the presidency. Chirac, defeated by President Francois Mitterrand last May 8, was trying to woo voters from Le Pen.

Aim for Unity

The conservative trade with Le Pen in Marseilles was aimed at keeping the vote of the right undivided for the final round of voting. It was not yet clear whether this strategy was widespread in France, but its use in Marseilles was significant enough, since Le Pen has more political strength there than in any other part of the country.

Le Pen, in fact, is running for a seat in the National Assembly from one of the districts in Marseilles. The conservatives, however, did not have to withdraw their candidate from that district since he had already been eliminated because of a poor showing in the first round.

Many voters in Marseilles, a depressed area with a heavy immigrant population and much unemployment, have been seduced by Le Pen’s repeated insistence that France’s economic and social problems stem mainly from its large numbers of immigrants, especially those from North Africa.

Socialists attacked the trade in Marseilles even though they and Communist candidates, as they have for many years, have done the same thing this week--withdrawing from the second round in favor of the strongest leftist candidate.

But Communists have a historical respectability in France that is usually denied to extreme rightists. During World War II, the extreme right collaborated with the Nazi Germans while the Communists fought in the Resistance.

Socialists Better Placed

In the first round of voting last Sunday, the conservatives and their allies took 40.52% of the popular vote, the Socialists and their allies 37.55%, the Communists 11.32%, and Le Pen’s National Front 9.65%. But, despite these national totals, the Socialists appeared better placed in most district contests to win next Sunday.

Many news analysts agreed with Socialist Premier Michel Rocard’s own analysis of the way these votes would translate into parliamentary seats after the final round of the election. “The message is clear,” he said in a radio interview Tuesday. “The electors in the first round have chosen to give Francois Mitterrand the parliamentary majority that he needs but not too much of one.”

It was obvious, however, that many conservatives believed that they still have a chance to hang on to control of the National Assembly or at least to prevent a Socialist majority. That feeling probably explained their willingness to risk embarrassment by dealing for a few seats in the Marseilles area.

In fact, Rocard, even while talking of the certainty of a Socialist majority, did not hesitate to warn voters that confusion lay ahead if they elected a conservative National Assembly once more. After the conservatives won control of the assembly in 1986, Mitterrand named Chirac as premier, bringing on two years of what the French called “cohabitation” in government.

‘Chirac or Me’

The premier said the voters have to choose “what they want: Chirac or me.” If they choose a Parliament that returns Chirac to the post of premier and thus bring on more years of governmental power divided between a Socialist president and a conservative premier, Rocard went on, the voters will once again have “hotheads in government, cohabitation and a wobbly and uncertain France.”

Several elements confused analysis. More than 34% of those registered did not vote in the first round, the highest abstention in France since World War II. It was not clear what these voters would do in the second round. Also, as in American congressional elections, local issues and local personalities, not national trends, seem to govern many local contests.

After his decisive reelection victory, Mitterrand named Rocard to replace Chirac as premier and then dissolved the conservative-controlled National Assembly. Polls had predicted a Socialist landslide in the parliamentary elections, but the first round of voting made it clear this will not happen.

Many analysts believe this has not disappointed Mitterrand. The president, who has said it is unhealthy to rule France with one party, may be content with a slight Socialist majority. That would ease his task of fulfilling his pledge to attract centrists and other non-Socialists into the government.