This article originally appeared in the May 29, 1995, issue.

'On the First You Choose...'

There is a basic rule of French electioneering: In the first round, when an absolute majority is required to get elected, voters can express their true preference. This time there were two special circumstances. First, the polls shifted successively in two opposite directions and then were proved wrong. Second, the two men presented as the main protagonists, Edouard Balladur and Jacques Chirac, belonged not to the same coalition but to the same party, the neo-Gaullist Rally for the Republic.

The respectable French right is composed of two broad families: one relatively liberal and free-trading, with former President Valery Giscard d'Estaing as a prime example; the other, more nationalist, dirigiste and authoritarian, brilliantly illustrated by General de Gaulle. But the frontier between the two has been vanishing. De Gaulle's successor, Georges Pompidou, the teacher turned banker, was already a crossbreed, and our two contenders, who met while members of his staff in 1962, are less Gaullist than Pompidoliens. Indeed, the haughty Balladur, financially cautious and eager privatizer, was so little Gaullist that his election to the presidency was expected in Paris to be followed by the merger of the two branches of the French right into a Conservative Party on the British model. In 1993, after the sweeping victory of the right in the parliamentary elections, Chirac handed the prime minister's job to his "friend" so as to prepare himself to run for the presidency. Balladur got intoxicated by the repeated message of the oracle. By February of this year--with all the polls attesting to his popularity--election as President seemed a formality. Poor old Chirac, deserted by friends, was reduced to the polling limbo of the low two figures.

Chirac, however, was not a man to give up. This was his third attempt to become President and, at 62, his last chance. Though a pure product of the French factory of high-level technocrats, the National School of Administration (E.N.A.), he has a long political past: twice prime minister, leader of his party and mayor of Paris since 1977. He cannot be accused of clinging to principles: He had been against European integration, then for Maastricht; for a French version of British Laborism, then for Reaganomics. Nor can he be accused of sticking to his own views: He was Pompidou's servant and then spokesman for a series of gurus, Balladur being the latest. But he is also an indefatigable activist, combining the skills of a technocrat with those of a Tammany Hall politician.

This time, Chirac showed both shrewdness and resilience. He sensed that the French, like the Italians, were not resigned but incensed. For months he trekked across the country proclaiming that unemployment was the root of evil, France was falling to pieces and he was the man to save it. One could not help smiling as the mayor who had presided over real estate speculation in Paris suddenly discovered the power to requisition housing to protect the homeless; the politician who as prime minister had abolished the wealth tax now paraded as a champion of social justice. But it worked. The oracles reversed their verdict: Balladur was the loser. This was the moment when the bandwagon-jumpers sighed, "We have betrayed in vain"; and when both sides hurled insults at each other, daggers drawn. The right thought it could afford the luxury of a bitter inner struggle because it had assumed the Socialists would be unable to recover for a long time.

Lionel and the Left. Lionel Jospin, though not the first choice of the Socialists, proved a wise one. Bespectacled and white-haired, he still looks youthful at 57. Though not very charismatic at first, he warmed up and gained in stature from week to week. A Protestant, he had a solid reputation for personal honesty, quite an asset these days. A product of E.N.A. like Chirac, he had left a cushy job in the foreign service to teach economics in a technological college. A leftist, opposed to the Algerian war in his youth, he joined Mitterrand's Socialist Party in 1972, and rose under his auspices. He was handed the leadership of the party nine years later, when Mitterrand was elected President, and kept it till 1988, when he became minister of education. In the past three years, out of office, he has maintained a certain distance.

The ghost of Mitterrand was hovering over this campaign. Jospin clearly tried to dissociate himself from his former mentor, to whom he paid homage only in his last important speech. From the Mitterrand heritage he tried to take the good (five weeks of holiday with pay, abolition of the death penalty) and reject the bad (unemployment and corruption). He endorsed the party's conversion to capitalism in 1983, while questioning the tyranny of money, which seems its logical sequel. He advocated Keynesian measures to prime the economy, though those might clash with the deflationary policy dictated by the search for a common European currency under the Maastricht Treaty, which he staunchly defended.

Overall he is for reforms that do not clash with the logic of the system and in this he may not accurately represent the mood prevailing on the left. His excellent showing in the first round concealed a real voter shift. If you add the 8.8 percent captured by the Communist Party, which, under the new leadership of the rather likable Robert Hue is staging a slight recovery, the striking 5 percent of the Trotskyist Arlette Laguiller and the 3.3 percent of the radical Green Dominique Voynet, the resulting 17 percent is close to the 23.3 percent Jospin scored. Especially at the last moment, when polls suggested the duel might be limited to the right, many leftists switched to Jospin. (The disputed point at many a dinner table was, Should we give the Socialists a lesson or help them to stay in the race?)

I am not arguing that a radical alternative has emerged to the left of the Socialist Party. However pleasant it was to see the Sports Palace of Paris filled with red flags and a youthful crowd chanting "Ce n'est qu'un debut," a vote for Laguiller was essentially a protest. Hue's campaign showed that something is stirring within the C.P., not that it has been transformed. And though Voynet may have made a greater effort to seek a new vision, she did not take off. Neither collectively nor individually did these left candidates provide a project for coherent action within the new international context. Their vote reflected an expectation, a mood, about which you probably did not find much in the American press.

You probably heard more about the 20 percent of voters at the other extreme. Jean-Marie Le Pen's 15 percent, a less than 1 percent gain over the 1988 first-round elections, would not have been so significant if Philippe de Villiers, who preaches xenophobia with a more aristocratic accent than Le Pen, had not gathered nearly another 5 percent.

Here we have all the elements for the climax of the first round. On April 23, the first round of balloting, France was stunned. The voters had dared to defy the pollsters. The oracle had said, Chirac first, Jospin and Balladur fighting it out for second. In fact, Jospin came first, Chirac scraped through with 21 percent and Balladur was right behind with 19 percent. It mattered little that overall the right was dominant or that in 1988 Mitterrand garnered 11 percent more than Jospin did this year. Jospin entered the second round as the winner.

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