NEWS ANALYSIS : Mitterrand Parries Voters’ Anger : France: Prostate cancer sidelines the president as European union ballot nears. He has acted to keep his unpopularity from being the issue.

Until the middle of the week leading up to Sunday’s crucial French vote on the Maastricht Treaty for European union, President Francois Mitterrand was confined to bed in a Paris hospital after prostate surgery.

The prostate operation, which Mitterrand on Wednesday announced revealed cancerous lesions not considered dangerous by his physicians, knocked the 75-year-old French president out of political action before one of the most important votes in his long career.

But even before he entered Cochin Hospital last week, Mitterrand had so skillfully confused the French public about his post-referendum intentions that many feel he had already accomplished the impossible--removing himself as one of the central issues in the Maastricht vote.

In fact, by masterfully avoiding direct answers about his future and planting tantalizing hints about possibly resigning in triumph if the referendum succeeds, Mitterrand may have converted some anti-Mitterrand votes to his advantage.

Earlier this week, Prime Minister Pierre Beregovoy insisted that Mitterrand will certainly not resign if the vote in the referendum is no. But on Tuesday, a Socialist Party colleague, Industry Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn, suggested that Mitterrand might step down, cutting short his seven-year term by two years, if the vote is yes.

“Perhaps the president will consider that his task had been accomplished,” said Strauss-Kahn, “and with the yes votes having won, he will end his term.”

As a result of these machinations, the president and his political tribe appear to have nurtured an electoral environment in which a voter whose main intention is to get rid of Mitterrand doesn’t know which way to turn, oui or non .

The most recent polls on the referendum show that only 12% of the French plan to use their ballot to vote disapproval of Mitterrand, compared to more than 20% in the middle of August.

It is not certain if the shift of focus in the referendum away from Mitterrand will be enough for the Maastricht supporters to succeed in what appears to be a very close vote. Mitterrand continues to fare very poorly in public opinion polls.

Historian Jean Lacouture said in an interview Wednesday that Mitterrand’s unpopularity will still cost votes in the yes camp.

“It is clear that a majority of the French are in favor of the European idea,” said Lacouture, the leading French biographer of Charles de Gaulle. “But I think the fact that it was (Mitterrand) who proposed the referendum will cost between 6% and 8% of the yes votes.”

Although he insists he would stay as president to help control the chaos in the case of a negative vote, it is difficult to imagine Mitterrand keeping power in the face of an overwhelming turnout against the treaty. It is equally difficult to imagine his not taking credit in the case of overwhelming victory.

But if his strategy to diminish personal implications in the vote finally succeeds, Mitterrand could avoid the fate of De Gaulle, who resigned prematurely from office in 1969 after linking his future to the results of a minor referendum on constitutional reform.

Mitterrand, along with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, was one of the most important architects of the treaty launching a federal-model European state and single European currency by 1999.

He is one of the treaty’s most able defenders, as he demonstrated in a three-hour televised debate at the Sorbonne on Sept 3.

But as De Gaulle learned in 1969, the French sometimes take out grudges against their leaders by voting against their wishes.

In recent weeks, Mitterrand has received help in his cause from unlikely sources. Former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, a staunch advocate of European federalism, urged his followers not to take out their wrath against Mitterrand by voting against Maastricht.

“You can’t refuse to marry someone,” said Giscard d’Estaing, “just because you don’t like the mayor.”

Mitterrand may also benefit from sympathy votes because of his health troubles--and, more important in the French context, his honesty about the nature of the incident. Many French still remember bitterly how former President Georges Pompidou hid from the public details of a more serious form of cancer before he died in office in 1974.

Prostate cancer is a relatively common ailment among men over 60. In Mitterrand’s case, it will be treated with hormones rather than with radiation or chemotherapy.

“It’s certainly nothing very nasty,” Alain Sobel, a French immunologist, told the Reuters news agency. “Thousands of people live perfectly normally with prostate cancer. It is easy to treat.”

When he was released from the hospital Wednesday afternoon, a day earlier than announced, Mitterrand joked with reporters who asked him if the brush with prostate cancer would cause him to resign.

“I don’t see why,” he said, “I don’t think they gave me a lobotomy.”