Politics Are Simpler Than Economics : France settles the political stalemate, but social unrest remains

Sunday’s French presidential election in which conservative Jacques Chirac defeated socialist Lionel Jospin decided everything, and nothing.

As the distinguished British newspaper the Financial Times put it Thursday, “France’s presidential election has been going on for so long that it is hard to believe that it will really be over this Sunday night.” The long illness of incumbent President Francois Mitterrand, the socialist in power for 14 years, coupled with the right-wing parlimentary majority, had left France less with a government than with a kind of permanent political war and presidential campaign. On Sunday, not only did that campaign end but the results were decisive: France now has a conservative government.

Even so, the appearance of achievement and purpose is perhaps greater than the reality. Neither Chirac nor Jospin differed very much on economic matters during the campaign. The election results may simply have reflected the fact that the French electorate, according to pollsters, is simply more conservative right now. And it is the economy that currently dominates all Gaul. With more than 3 million out of work and the unemployment rate stuck at above 12%, the issue is jobs and pay. In March, a series of devastating air, rail and urban-transportation strikes practically brought France to its knees. Chirac himself said the nation was now “in a state of social emergency . . . without parallel since the end of the Fourth Republic (1958).”

Thus though the long presidential election is over, the domestic crisis in France is not. The prospect is for further labor unrest and possible instability. Chirac offered no magic bullets; the plain hope is that somehow the now-expanding French economy, freed from the torpor of its worst recession since World War II, will alleviate the economic ills virtually without substantial government intervention (the preferred French conservative policy position).

It is in France’s relations with its Western allies that the election results are perhaps the clearest. France will remain committed to the Franco-German alliance as the leading edge of its foreign policy, will remain committed to the goal of a single European currency and will remain from time to time the thoroughly irritating thorn in the side of the United States that it has always been. Paris’ recent expulsion of two American officials for industrial espionage was a messy public airing of dirty linen that a genuinely considerate ally would have worked to have kept quiet.

Will the conservative Chirac try a little harder not to play to the anti-American grandstand and not (publicly at any rate) taunt Washington? Perhaps. But it must be kept in mind that Chirac first and foremost is a Frenchman. And the implications of that for Washington are always potentially significant.