The French Election

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 25030, 12 November 1946, Page 6

The French Election

Like its two predecessors of the last 13 months, the General Election held in France on Sunday has done nothing to simplify the urgent tasks before the nation. Though in the election campaign all the parties seemed to be agreed that the long era of tripartite government must be brought to an end, the electorate appears once again to have voted so evenly between Left and Right as almost certainly to preclude a Government either purely Left or purely Right. With the count for metropolitan France complete, the Communists are shown to have narrowly displaced the M.R.P., of the moderate Right, from the position the June election gave it as the largest single party in the Assembly; but

the Socialists, midway between the ‘ Communists and the M.R.P., have gone further into decline, and the

parties to the Right of the M.R.P. have increased their representation. Once again, it seems, the state of the parties will make it difficult to form a Government, and it may well be that the Communist - M.R.P. - Socialist coalition will be renewed and that the handicaps it imposes on efficient government will continue to operate.

In a very important sense, however, the latest election was markedly different from its predecessors. The French electorate in October of last year and again in June chose Assemblies to tide the nation over the transition from the Third Republic to the Fourth Republic. Less than a month ago the electorate approved, if only faintly, the constitution submitted to it by the second Constituent Assembly, and at the end of the month the constitution of the Fourth Republic was formally sealed. The Assembly chosen on Sunday was thus one with a life, not of seven months, but of five years. Elections to the Council of the Republic are to follow, and will in turn make possible the election of a President. By the end of the year, therefore, provisional government will have given way to regular government. The coalition Governments of the provisional period have failed, as the Paris correspondent of the “ Manchester “ Guardian ” and his colleague of the “ Economist ” recently noted, to produce a clear, effective policy. The parliamentary machine has not worked as it is meant to work, and there has been a whole series of scandals. The wine and food scandals, wrote the “ Economist’s ” correspondent, had been bad enough, but the financial confusion that had inevitably followed in the wake of hand-to-mouth administration over a period- of two years was many times more alarming. Corruption, cowardice, and sheer stupidity [he added] can be tolerated as long as they are thought to arise from recognisably special circumstances to which a rigid term is set; but once the suspicion gains ground that they are endemic to parliamentary government, then the main barrier to dictatorship is laid low.

With the change from provisional to regular government the excuse disappears, and the parliamentary machine must work as it is meant to work. But the burden on it is not lightened for Sunday’s vote. To remove it will call for greater tolerance and goodwill from the major political parties than they have hitherto shown.