EUROPE : Priest Rallies Powerful to Aid Paris Homeless : France’s leading conservatives have leaped to join Abbe Pierre’s liberal crusade with eye toward garnering leftist votes in coming presidential race.

Next to Pere Noel, the most powerful man in France this week was a small, bespectacled, 82-year-old Roman Catholic priest with wiry white whiskers and a wooden cane.

His name is Abbe Pierre, and for 40 years he has been a tireless advocate for the poor and the homeless, badgering politicians and imploring the well-heeled to do more to help the less fortunate.

But this week Pierre had the most important politicians in France leaping to join his crusade.

It began after church Sunday, when the father staged his latest attempt to draw attention to the sans abri, people without shelter. He led a group of several hundred homeless protesters in a brazen break-in, seizing a vacant apartment building in a fancy neighborhood on the Left Bank of the Seine River and turning it into their home.

Since then, Pierre and his supporters have watched in surprise as the nation’s most important conservative politicians, their minds fixed on the presidential elections next year and the large numbers of left-wing voters without a strong candidate, elbow each other for the chance to help him.

Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, a front-runner in the presidential campaign, despite his as-yet-undeclared candidacy, welcomed a squatter delegation to his lush, cavernous office, where he promised them that the police will not try to eject them from their new apartments.

That put the problem squarely in the lap of Balladur’s chief rival for the presidency, Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac.

Not to be outdone, Chirac went on national television to declare the situation facing the homeless “unbearable.” And he promised to begin enforcing a 1945 law that allows the city to take privately owned vacant buildings and use them, temporarily, to house the homeless.

Abbe Pierre wasn’t convinced. While Balladur was “a man with whom dialogue is possible,” the priest predicted that Chirac would either renege on his promise or carry it out dishonestly.

“We have seen him (Chirac) in action before,” Pierre said. “Once is enough.”

The newspapers of Paris have not failed to notice that the announcement by Chirac, a champion of business interests and virulent opponent of wealth redistribution, represented an about-face.

Liberation, the left-leaning Paris daily, sneered at the mayor’s political “conversion.” “To squash Balladur, Chirac is ready to do anything, even to throw everything he’s done for the past 20 years into a sack in the Seine,” Liberation said.

In fact, though, it is Abbe Pierre who has emerged as the consummate politician. The occupation of the apartment building, which had been set for demolition, was a ploy that homeless advocates had used before, with modest success. But this time, the timing could not have been better.

First, the country is awash in the warm, generous feelings of the Yuletide. But more than that, the campaign for retiring President Francois Mitterrand’s job has reached a crucial juncture, just four months before the elections.

Jacques Delors, the Socialist Party stalwart who had been leading all contenders in the polls, decided two weeks ago not to run for the presidency. That left the devastated Socialists with no strong alternative candidate.

So the race now is between Balladur and Chirac, like-minded men from the same conservative party. If, as expected, the two emerge as the top vote-getters in the first round of elections in April, they will need votes from the left to win the runoff in May.

*

The man playing all this like his own Christmas tune is Pierre, a man sometimes called the Mother Teresa of Paris. Born Henri Groues, he adopted the nom de guerre Abbe Pierre, or Father Pierre, when he joined the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of World War II.

After the war, Pierre served briefly in Parliament, using his salary to help the poor. He rose to fame on Feb. 1, 1954, when he launched a public appeal for money to help the homeless after the death from exposure of a woman who had been evicted from her Paris apartment for not paying rent. Today, opinion polls consistently list him as the person the French most admire.

The problem of the homeless has been growing in France, where more than 3 million people are jobless. Social service agencies estimate that as many as 400,000 people are homeless and 2.4 million more are “poorly housed,” squeezed into the homes of friends or family. And Paris has more than 100,000 vacant apartments, homeless advocates say.