French Prime Minister Cresson Could Go the Way of All Those Lenin Statues : Politics: She courted French Communists and has alienated the British and Japanese.

Only three months after her history-making appointment as France’s first woman prime minister, Edith Cresson may be on the brink of losing her job.

Opinions vary on when President Francois Mitterrand might make the change, ranging from weeks to several months. Her most likely replacement is the current president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, one of the principal architects of the unified, borderless European market set for 1992.

Cresson’s troubles can be traced in part to her combative, outspoken style. She has alienated everyone from British heterosexuals, whose masculinity she publicly doubted, to Japanese industrialists, whose business ethics she has attacked.

But if, as is widely rumored, Mitterrand replaces her with another Socialist Party leader, one reason would be the collapse of communism in Western Europe as well as in the Soviet Union. In that case, Cresson, 57, would have the dubious achievement of being one of the first Western political victims of the post-putsch period.

Just weeks before the failed Soviet coup d’etat in August accelerated the worldwide decline of communism, Cresson began to court the French Communist Party to help her with legislation in the National Assembly and to aid the Socialists in upcoming parliamentary elections. It was one of the first gestures of openness from the government to the French Communists since Mitterrand appointed four Cabinet ministers from the party after his election to the presidency in 1981.

But the clumsy coup in the Soviet Union instantly pushed the image of the once-powerful French Communist Party to an all-time low, dragging Cresson down with it. In a poll published this week in the newsmagazine L’Express, 79% of those questioned described communism as “worn out.” More than 83% described longtime French party leader George Marchais as washed up.

Cresson’s ill-timed political approach to the Communists put her in the wrong camp as an anti-left backlash followed the coup.

“The Socialist Party is in the process of becoming an orphan,” the influential columnist Serge July wrote in the newspaper Liberation this week, “thanks to the collapse of the French Communist Party (that has been) just as rapid, just as instantaneous as that of the Soviet big brother.”

Mitterrand added to the problem. In a press conference only hours after the coup was announced on Aug. 19, he referred to the eight ringleaders as the “new leaders” of the Soviet Union. This inspired a rash of criticism and satire of the 74-year-old Mitterrand, including political cartoons showing cranes toppling Lenin-like statues of the French leader from public squares.

The bad timing has put pressure on Mitterrand to remove his unpopular left-leaning prime minister and replace her with a more centrist, market-oriented politician, such as Delors. A poll for Figaro magazine found confidence in Cresson at 35%, a drop of three percentage points since July.

The poll also found Delors to be France’s most popular politician, partly because he has spent the past several years serving the European Economic Community in Brussels and is therefore untainted by the recent decline of the French economy and bitter, inner-party feuds. In the Figaro poll, 53% said they wanted Delors “to play an important role in the months and years to come.” This was a higher positive rating than for any other politician. Moreover, the support for Delors was equally distributed between the right and left.

Speculation about Cresson’s possible dismissal and Delors’ elevation have been a major theme in the French press during the politically charged, post-summer vacation period known here as la rentree (the return).

In addition to columnist July, established political pundits Jean-Marie Colombani in the newspaper Le Monde and Alain Duhamel of the Quotidien de Paris have also weighed in on Delors:

“The most popular politician in France is named Jacques Delors,” Duhamel wrote enthusiastically in a recent column. “No one inspires more trust, no one seems less compromised by the exercise of power.”

Delors, meeting this week in Brussels with the European Community’s foreign ministers on the Yugoslav crisis and relations with Eastern Europe, declined to comment about the possible appointment. But some of his staff seem unconvinced that Mitterrand would jettison Cresson soon, since that would amount to admitting a mistake in appointing her. Moreover, these staffers said, Mitterrand has never liked Delors, who for many years was a bureaucrat with the Bank of France.

Delors and Mitterrand do share a desire to rewrite the EC’s founding treaty, so that the community has a greater role in European foreign and security policy, and is more firmly on the road toward a common currency. The process is expected to continue into 1992 and Delors, the moving force behind it, does not want to abandon it in midstream.

If Delors leaves before his second four-year term as EC president expires at the end of 1992, his term would probably be completed by one of his vice presidents--Frans Andriessen of the Netherlands, Leon Brittan of Britain or Martin Bangemann of Germany. Andriessen, whose specialty is the community’s foreign policy, is considered the likely first choice of the 12 EC heads of state.

Times staff writer Joel Havemann in Brussels contributed to this report.