EUROPE : Fondest French Election Hope: Amnesty for Parking Scofflaws

When taxi driver Maryanne Messomo found herself stuck behind a pokey driver looking vainly for a parking spot this week, she swore to herself. But, she admitted to a passenger, she understood the problem.

“The French always park anywhere they want, but even more so now,” she said. “Everyone knows the new president is going to forgive them.”

Ah, yes, a sense of royal forgiveness is in the spring air here.

On Sunday, the country will elect a new president for the first time in seven years. And the winner, if history is any guide, will ease the country’s usual post-election depression by declaring l’amnistie-- an amnesty for parking tickets, speeding tickets and all manner of small infractions.

“That’s what the president always does,” Messomo said. “The policemen don’t even put tickets on cars anymore.”

In fact, the pervenches , or periwinkles, as the blue-uniformed meter maids are known, are still writing plenty of tickets. And neither Jacques Chirac nor Lionel Jospin, the two candidates, has promised an amnesty. But only the most pessimistic motorists would pay a fine now.

That has created a difficult situation on the already problematic roads of France, which has more cars per person (about one for every two people) than any Western power except the United States.

In Paris, there are 1.6 million registered cars and 1.3 million parking places. That’s 300,000 cars, at any given moment, looking for a place to park. The police figure that 68,000, and probably more, are parked illegally every day.

An amnesty has been enacted by every president since Charles de Gaulle, a keen judge of his countrymen. But not everyone in France supports the idea, and this time the critics, including the police and road-safety groups, are raising the alarm.

Although few hard statistics are available, it is clear to anyone driving in France these days that there is, as the daily newspaper Le Monde put it, “an ambient feeling of impunity” out there.

More drivers are speeding and more are parking without paying the meter or double- and even triple-parking. Hardly anyone can be found arguing over a 250-franc (about $50) parking ticket, so sure are they that it will soon disappear.

A group called Road Safety saw the trend begin last year, just as the first candidates began making their speeches. Road deaths fell nearly 6% in 1994, to 8,533, but there was a sharp increase over the last three months.

The group blames “the syndrome of national amnesty.” In the first months of 1988, just before President Francois Mitterrand was reelected (and, of course, promptly granted an amnesty), there were 652 more road deaths than in the same period a year before, the group says. In addition, Mitterrand’s last amnesty was said to have cost the state $1.8 billion in forgiven fines.

Road Safety calls the hope of an amnesty “a veritable incitation to lawbreaking,” and it has demanded that the candidates declare early that there will be no amnesty. But, perhaps understandably, that appeal doesn’t carry any weight with the candidates, who want to win this election.

The road safety arguments are a tough sell in France, where avoiding tickets is a kind of game and another example of thwarting the hated restrictions imposed by the state. Few see much of a connection between speeding and road safety. Last year, the government was forced to withdraw a proposal to crack down on motorists going at extremely high speeds.

A more persuasive argument against amnesties is that they fly in the face of France’s republican tradition, reminding voters of the vast powers of the presidency and setting a tone of monarchical fiat.

“Isn’t it time,” Pierre Lipmann of Paris wrote to Le Monde, “to renounce a demagogic tradition that no longer has a place in the electoral process?”

The answer, for many in France, is no, but thanks for asking.

The scope of presidential amnesties has varied. President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, in 1974, forgave five months of parking fines as well as infractions incurred during “social conflicts.”

Mitterrand’s amnesties in 1981 and 1988 were broader, covering all crimes for which a fine was the only penalty, except “racist acts.” He even included illegal abortions done by non-doctors.