Mitterrand to Govern Without Majority

President Francois Mitterrand, sounding much like an American President forced to deal with a stubborn Congress, Tuesday announced the reappointment of Premier Michel Rocard and vowed that his Socialist government would have no trouble governing France despite its lack of a parliamentary majority.

In his first public statement since the disappointing parliamentary election returns Sunday, Mitterrand said that Rocard and the Socialists, though they had fallen 13 seats short of an absolute majority, have a working majority.

“The parliamentary majority exists,” the president said. “It is strong. It is coherent. It will endure.

“France,” he went on, “is governed and will be governed.”

Following the French tradition of a premier stepping aside after each major election, Rocard, a fellow Socialist appointed a month ago just after Mitterrand’s decisive reelection victory, handed his resignation to the president during the morning. But Mitterrand refused it, asking the premier to stay on until the new National Assembly meets for the first time June 23.

Immediate Reappointment

The president, speaking on national television, said he will accept the resignation on that date but will reappoint Rocard immediately and ask him to put together a new government.

Mitterrand said that he had asked Rocard “to formulate his policies and put them to Parliament as soon as possible each time they become the subject of legislation.”

That sounded much like the usual American practice, where a President presents bills to Congress and then tries to rally support, from both parties, behind them.

Ironically, although the American system is based in large part on the philosophy of an 18th-Century French jurist, the Baron de Montesquieu, it is very strange and foreign to France. French governments are used to parliamentary majorities that vote exactly the way they are told. Bargaining for votes in the National Assembly will be a new experience for the Fifth French Republic that was instituted by President Charles de Gaulle 30 years ago.

Conservative Loss Important

Bargaining will be necessary because the Socialists, although they won a plurality, have only 276 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly. Their main opponents, a loose coalition of conservatives who controlled the outgoing assembly, won 271 seats.

Mitterrand, in his speech, stressed that, although he would have preferred the Socialists to win an absolute majority, it was even more important that the voters had taken the majority away from the conservatives.

A good deal of stability was guaranteed to the Socialist government by the 27 seats held by the Communists. The conservatives can bring down Rocard only if the Communists join them in a vote of censure against him.

No Alliance Ever

But Andre Lajoine, the Communist candidate in the presidential elections that Mitterrand won a month ago, promised that a conservative-Communist alliance against Rocard would never happen.

“We would never join with the right,” he said in a television interview. “We would never practice the policy of the worst.”

Mitterrand, as he did often during his reelection campaign, said he still believed in “ouverture,” an openness that might bring some centrist politicians and their parties into the government. Rocard presumably could try to persuade some to join the Socialists when he formed his second government.

But the whole tone of Mitterrand’s brief speech underscored that the Socialists could run an efficient government even if centrists refused to join them. The president made it clear, however, that Rocard might have to court centrist votes during every legislative battle.