French Voters Turn Away From Socialists

French voters handed the Socialist Party of President Francois Mitterrand its worst ballot score in 20 years during nationwide regional elections marked by significant gains by France’s extreme right-wing National Front party and two environmental parties.

In a nationally spotlighted election here in this important French Riviera capital, National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen won approximately 28% of the vote, highest ever for the leader of Europe’s most potent far-right movement. The strong showing bolstered Le Pen’s ambition for a territorial base in France’s fifth-largest city, a tourist and retirement mecca with large populations of North African immigrants and politically conservative former French Algerian colonialists.

However, Le Pen’s hopes for a clear-cut victory in Nice, where he is known to covet the job of mayor, were thwarted. The 63-year-old National Front leader finished slightly behind moderate-right candidate Susan Sauvaigo, a local attorney from a prominent Nicois family.

Nationally, a coalition of two moderate-right parties, Rally for the Republic and Union for French Democracy, led the field with about 35%, while Mitterrand’s governing Socialist Party continued to fall in the public’s esteem, dropping under 20% of the vote for the first time since 1969. With incomplete results, the National Front party appeared to have won close to 14% of the vote in the elections for leadership in France’s 22 domestic and four overseas regions. The National Front’s previous high score was 12% in the 1989 elections for members of the European Parliament.

With British and Italian elections set for early next month, Sunday’s vote in France was the first in what experts believe could be a series of setbacks for incumbent European leaders.

As expected, two rival environmental parties, the Greens and Ecology Generation, won a combined total of about 13% of the national vote. The strong showings by environmentalists and the National Front demonstrated the strong anti-Establishment sentiments of the French voters in their first nationwide balloting in four years.

Reacting to the vote, Socialist Party secretary and former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius described it as a “fearsome and dangerous breakthrough by the extreme right.” Socialist Prime Minister Edith Cresson called it a “setback but not a defeat” for her party and vowed to continue as head of the French government despite widespread speculation that she would be replaced shortly after the vote.

The nationwide regional vote, along with departmental elections the same day in about half the French territory, was widely viewed as a public referendum on the flagging, 11-year reign of President Francois Mitterrand, who at age 75 appears to have lost his sure grip on the French political scene.

In France’s last nationwide balloting, for deputies to the European Parliament in 1989, Mitterrand’s Socialists fared much better, gaining 23.6% of the vote compared with 37% for the coalition slate of the moderate-right parties, 12% for the National Front and 11% for the environmentalists.

Since that vote, however, Mitterrand’s party, rocked by allegations of corruption and blamed for a sinking economy, has fallen badly in public esteem. A recent poll showed public approval for Cresson, whom Mitterrand appointed last summer in an failed effort to revive public spirits, at only 19%, lowest ever for a French premier. Political analysts say the country has fallen into one of its periodic political torpors.

On the eve of Sunday’s vote, it was widely believed that a particularly bad showing by the Socialists would force Mitterrand to make a leadership change, replacing Cresson with another Socialist politician. Finance Minister Pierre Beregovoy, European Commission President Jacques Delors and Defense Minister Pierre Joxe are the politicians most often mentioned in the French press as Cresson’s possible successor.

As the economy’s decline began last year, with unemployment reaching nearly 10%, highest in Western Europe, Le Pen’s National Front started to gain strength with its xenophobic, anti-immigrant rhetoric.

The demagogic Le Pen blamed immigrant populations, mainly from Muslim North Africa, for crime and rising unemployment. France’s 3 million unemployed, he said, are roughly equal in number to the legal and illegal immigrants in France. Le Pen’s deputy, Bruno Megret, presented a 50-point National Front program aimed at expelling immigrants from France.

The message was especially effective here in the south of France, port of entry for most North African immigrants, where large communities of former French Algerian colonialists and elderly retirees from other parts of France share Le Pen’s extreme right-wing views.

To block the National Front party, the Socialists persuaded millionaire entrepreneur Bernard Tapie to head a list of candidates in the 4-million population Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region that includes Marseilles and Nice, France’s third and fifth largest cities.

In one of the few bright spots for the Socialists, Tapie scored much higher than expected in Marseilles, blunting the National Front’s push for a territorial foothold in the region.

As it is, the National Front is expected to increase its representation in the 123-seat regional council but can only rule in combination with traditional parties of the right.

Tapie, a handsome, tough-talking businessman from the depressed Paris suburbs, anchored his huge motor yacht in the old harbor of Marseilles and recruited an unusual list of candidates from the region that included actors, fashion designers and two government ministers.

Taking Le Pen head-on, Tapie opened his campaign by calling all those who vote for the National Front “bastards,” a comment for which he later apologized.

When earlier polls showed the National Front leading in Marseilles and Nice, the Roman Catholic church broke its tradition of electoral impartiality to encourage people to vote. Without mentioning Le Pen by name, Cardinal Albert Decourtray, archbishop of Lyon, warned against the election of “a new Hitler.”

It was an important departure for the church, burdened with a history of collaboration with the German-backed Vichy government during World War II and accused of harboring and protecting former Nazi collaborators in the post-World War II period.