French Right Consolidates Parliament Victory : Elections: In final round, alliance wins huge majority. An isolated Mitterrand will name conservative premier.

French voters called Sunday for a rightward shift in government, ejecting the governing Socialist Party of President Francois Mitterrand and giving a massive majority to an alliance of moderate right-wing candidates in the final round of national parliamentary elections.

Official results for 569 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament, gave 458 seats to the Union for France alliance, with only 66 seats going to the Socialists and their allies. The French Communist Party, which often votes with the Socialists, won only 23 seats. The rest went to a scattering of smaller parties.

“It was a very severe defeat,” said Socialist Party Secretary Laurent Fabius, who barely survived his own race for reelection. “The right dominates nearly everything.”

Among prominent Socialist losers in Sunday’s parliamentary vote were Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, former Prime Minister Michel Rocard and former Education Minister Lionel Jospin. Rocard’s defeat in his western Paris suburban district of Conflans-Ste.-Honorine was an especially hard blow for the man expected to replace Mitterrand as the Socialist Party’s candidate in the 1995 presidential election.

Sunday’s outcome will mean a complete change in faces in all the key government positions except the presidency, where lame-duck Mitterrand, ailing and increasingly isolated, still has two more years in his term.

A handful of French conservatives called Sunday for Mitterrand to step down early. But most of the victorious party leaders appeared resigned to serving in a state of political “cohabitation” with the Socialist president until his term expires. A national voter survey conducted Sunday by the Sofres polling agency showed that 51% favored Mitterrand’s serving out his term, while 41% felt he should quit and 8% had no opinion.

The 76-year-old Mitterrand, under treatment for prostate cancer, is scheduled to appear on national television tonight to announce his choice for a prime minister to lead the new conservative government. Heavily favored for the post is former Finance Minister Edouard Balladur, a member of the neo-Gaullist Rally for the Republic party, the leading partner in the winning alliance.

The way was cleared for Balladur on Sunday night when Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac, the Rally for the Republic’s national leader, announced that he would not accept the job. Chirac’s party finished with at least 20 more seats in the new National Assembly than the French Democratic Union, the Rally’s main partner in the moderate-right alliance. The Democratic Union is headed by former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing.

Although the extreme right-wing National Front party led by Jean-Marie Le Pen had candidates in more than 100 runoff races, it failed to win a single seat in the new Parliament. Likewise, the two major ecology-based parties, the Greens and Ecology Generation, were shut out at the polls.

The strong showing by the Rally for the Republic, which claims linear political descent from the late French leader Charles de Gaulle, establishes Chirac, 60, as the front-runner to represent the right in the presidential election.

Chirac served as prime minister in the previous “cohabitation” government under Mitterrand in 1986-88. He was the losing candidate against Mitterrand in the 1988 presidential election.

The new rightist government inherits several national problems that led to the Socialists’ ouster, notably a persistently high unemployment rate of more than 10.5% and growing public concerns about crime and illegal immigration.

At a recent breakfast, Charles Pasqua, leader of the nationalist wing of the Rally for the Republic and the leading candidate for the post of defense minister in the new government, said the likely conservative strategy will be to blame the country’s woes on Socialist policies and map out a five-year plan for recovery, linking the plan’s success to the election of its candidate for president in 1995.

One of the biggest challenges facing the new government will be to prevent divisions between its two main components, Chirac’s Rally and Giscard d’Estaing’s Democratic Union. Despite Chirac’s leading position on the right, Giscard d’Estaing still harbors strong presidential ambitions.

Unlike the previous period of “cohabitation,” when the right held only a four-vote majority in the National Assembly, the huge advantage for the moderate right in the new Parliament could cause cracks in the partnership.

Waiting to exploit them will be the remnants of the once-dominant Socialist Party, which suffered in recent years from divisions in its own ranks.

“The defeat shows the need for new ideas and new practices,” said Socialist leader Fabius. “I hope it means the end of rival forces in our own party. Tonight the left enters into opposition.”