Cresson Survives Confidence Vote in Furor Over Habash

The French government survived a parliamentary vote of confidence on Tuesday over its handling of the controversial hospitalization here last month of Palestinian guerrilla leader George Habash.

The censure vote proposed by center-right opposition parties in the French National Assembly received 261 votes, 28 votes short of the tally needed to bring down the government of Prime Minister Edith Cresson.

Opposition leaders framed the vote as a condemnation of the “political and moral crisis gripping our country.” But their effort to force new elections failed after the Assembly’s 26 French Communist Party members refused to join in the vote, which requires an absolute majority of the 577-member lawmaking body.

Debate on the censure vote began last Friday during a special session of the Assembly called by French President Francois Mitterrand in an effort to calm the storm surrounding the Jan. 29 entry into France of Habash, 65, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The decision to permit Habash into the country for treatment created an instant furor that enraged opposition parties and divided the governing Socialist Party.

Four senior civil servants and an adviser to Mitterrand were fired over the Habash affair. But many felt that Cresson, Foreign Minister Roland Dumas and Interior Minister Philippe Marchand should also resign.

After fighting among themselves for several days over the affair, the Socialist members of the Assembly finally rallied around Cresson during the debate over the censure vote on Friday.

In what the newspaper Le Monde and other observers described as her best speech since being named prime minister last April, Cresson led the Socialists in a political pep rally in which she listed the accomplishments of years of power shared by the party and its leftist allies.

At the end, Cresson characterized foes in the center-right opposition as power-starved opportunists who would do anything to again gain control of France after 10 years of political impotence.

“Most of them,” she said of the opposition, “have contracted in this long abstinence such an appetite for position, honor and money that it is easy to predict that on the first occasion (that) they would throw themselves into power with a kind of gluttony, not bothering to choose the time nor the morsel.”

The most compelling speech from the opposition came from former Minister of Culture Francois Leotard, who turned his skillful, biting oratory directly toward Mitterrand. “One man alone,” said Leotard, “governs France today. Combatted by his rivals, irritated by the press, outflanked by his likely successor (former Prime Minister Michel Rocard), ignored by his party, surrounded by unknown fears. . . .”