De Gaulle Faces Cabinet Crisis

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29099, 11 January 1960, Page 9

De Gaulle Faces Cabinet Crisis

(Rec. 10 p.m.) PARIS, January 9. The French President (General de Gaulle) is facing a crisis as a result of growing disagreements within the French Cabinet. The Finance Minister (Mr Antoine Pinay), who opposes the controlled economic planning of his Gaullist fellow-Ministers, talked with the Prime Minister (Mr Michel Debre) for an hour yesterday in an apparently vain attempt to solve their differences.

When he left he hurried through waiting reporters to his car without a word.

Before seeing Mr Debre he had been more talkative. He did not repeat his constantly reiterated threat to resign if he failed to get a free hand to veto policies he could not approve, but told reporters: “A (Government) decree will be needed if they want to get rid of me.”

The American Associated Press said only President de Gaulle could accept a Minister’s resignation or remove him from office.

The news agency reported hints by friends of Mr Pinay that two other Conservative independent Ministers might follow him out of the Cabinet if he went — the Minister of Agriculture (Mr Henri Rocherau) and Mr Max Flechet, Secretary of State for Economic Planning. With the post of Education Minister still unfilled after Mr Andre Boulloche resigned last month in protest over increased State aid for Catholic schools, Mr Debre might then have to carry out a

widespread reshuffling of his year-old Government.

Mr Pinay told reporters before his meeting with Mr Debre that he opposed the Gaullist plan to give employee representatives 25 per cent, of the seats on corporation boards because it would lead to “the Sovietisation of the firms concerned and the creation of tens of thousands of civil servants to control them.”

According to the news agency, Mr Pinay added that he also opposed plans for a national conversion bureau to aid firms which had to switch production to meet overall industrial policy needs. This. Mr Pinay claimed, would be “a national society for limping businesses.” It would incite all ailing firms to seek State aid.

He said he disapproved plans for a national petroleum distribution agency because it would compete with existing corporations which had won the confidence of private investors. The political editor of the influential newspaper “Le Monde,” Mr Jacques Fauvet, said last night: “The Rightists in Parliament are mistaken if they imagine by shaking the precarious balance of the new regime they can bring about a return to a more classical and less presidential system. Everything leads one to believe that a new crisis would bring us a more authoritarian regime."