Socialists End Feud Over 1995 Candidate : France: Party leaders agree to a truce after a scolding from President Mitterrand.

After a scolding from French President Francois Mitterrand, feuding Socialist Party leaders called a truce Wednesday in a bitter, oddly premature power struggle to see who will succeed him as the party’s next presidential candidate.

Said by aides to be “embarrassed and furious” over the public squabbling among his would-be political successors--they are the prime minister, two government ministers, the Speaker of the National Assembly and the president of the European Commission--Mitterrand summoned party first secretary Pierre Mauroy to the Elysee Palace late Tuesday. He called for a cease-fire in the succession battle, which comes a full five years before his term as president expires in 1995.

After meeting all night, the party leaders emerged at 5 a.m. Wednesday with a compromise plan that will keep Mauroy, a former prime minister, as party first secretary and portion out other key party posts to supporters of the five rivals for Mitterrand’s job.

According to political analysts here, the fight inside the Socialist Party was the worst in the 20 years since Mitterrand, 73, built it into an important national political organization.

“The Socialist Party will likely pay dearly for the disastrous effects produced by the quarrels between these pretenders who are only thinking about the succession of Francois Mitterrand,” wrote editor Andre Fontaine in an editorial on the front page of the influential Paris daily Le Monde.

Signs of the cracks in the ruling party were obvious over the weekend at its biennial convention in the Brittany capital of Rennes. The four-day meeting ended in disarray after delegates, hooting and whistling at rivals of those they supported, failed to agree on a party platform or name someone to the important post of first party secretary.

In an attempt to break the convention deadlock, centered mainly on a feud between National Assembly Speaker Laurent Fabius and Education Minister Lionel Jospin, both presidential contenders, party leaders gathered in Paris beginning Tuesday evening.

Ideological differences were a factor in the convention debate, mainly between factions that favor a market-directed, social democratic role for the party (Fabius, Prime Minister Michel Rocard and European Commission President Jacques Delors) and those who favor a more traditional leftist model (Jospin, Mauroy and Defense Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement).

However, most of the fighting was purely political and personal, with eight government ministers lined up behind Fabius, the 43-year-old French political wonder-child who is said to have the personal blessing of Mitterrand, and most of the rest behind Jospin.

The Jospin-Fabius rivalry dates to 1988, when Jospin successfully blocked an attempt by Mitterrand to install Fabius as party first secretary, replacing Mauroy. The party secretary position is considered essential for anyone seeking the nomination to replace Mitterrand if he retires, as expected, in 1995.

Absent from the fray in Rennes was Mitterrand himself, who has had little direct involvement in the party since he was elected to his second seven-year term in May, 1988. True to his new nickname in the French press-- Dieu (“God”)--Mitterrand kept an Olympian distance from the rowdy meeting, sending only a short greeting wishing them luck in “your convention.”

Part of this, one diplomat here noted, is because Mitterrand, who received 54% of the vote in the 1988 election, is more popular than his own party, which seldom tops 35% of the vote, and therefore feels no need to be involved in the daily grit of political life.

However, Michel Martin-Roland, co-author of a new, two-volume political biography of Mitterrand scheduled for publication in October, said the president followed the convention closely from home, fearing the unseemly bickering would damage the party in National Assembly elections in 1993.

“Mitterrand’s main priority,” said Martin-Roland, “is to have a nice ending to his second seven-year term. He wants to make sure that the 1993 National Assembly elections are not a remake of 1986.”

That’s when the Socialists lost assembly elections and Mitterrand was forced to rule France in a “cohabitation” with Gaullist Prime Minister Jacques Chirac.

Although Mitterrand favors Fabius, the man many think may benefit most from the party divisions is Mitterrand’s old political rival, Rocard. In every Socialist convention since 1971, it was Rocard, representing the centrist-right wing of the party, who was at the center of debates.

This time, the prime minister sat mostly on the sidelines, except for issuing occasional statements urging party unity. Since he was named prime minister in 1988, Rocard, 59, has been a popular leader, second only to Mitterrand in most political polls, despite the fact that his Socialist government does not control a majority of seats in the National Assembly and must count on the Communists for votes on key issues.

However, he is still resented by Mitterrand purists for his opposition to the president during previous conventions.