Giscard arrives in Yugoslavia

Press, 7 December 1976, Page 8

Giscard arrives in Yugoslavia

NZPA-Reuter Belgrade Mr Valery Giscard d’Estaing has become the first French President to visit post-war Communist Yugoslavia, having arrived for a two-day official visit originally planned for last September.

The journey was postponed because President Tito was forced to rest by an acute liver ailment, from which he has since recovered. French officials are stressing the mainly political nature of the visit, but the Yugoslav side will be pushing for economic gains in its relationships with France and the European Economic Community.

Yugoslavia imported twice as much from France as it exported this year, and it wants to bridge the gap. It also wants to balance its trade with the E.E.C., with which it had a deficit of more than two billion dollars last year.

In Paris, months of sim-

mering political rivalry between President Giscard and the former Prime Minister. Mr Jacques Chirac, burst into the open after Sunday’s overhaul of France’s Gaullist Party.

Mr Chirac, aged 44, remoulded the old Gaullist U.D.R. Party into a new fighting force called the Rassemblement Pour La Republique (Rally For The Republic) at a giant Paris conference. It left him the most uncontested Gaullist leader since General Charles de Gaulle. Upstaging the non-Gaullist President, whose authority depends on personal dominance of the Government coalition parties, Mr Chirac set his movement the task of beating the Opposition Left, singlehanded if necessary, in the 1978 General Election. The Chirac forces got far less publicity than they hoped for their bold political move. A strike stopped the publication of French newspapers yesterday.