Socialists for polls

Press, 26 May 1981, Page 8

Socialists for polls

NZPA-Reuter Paris The Socialist Party of the new French President (Mr Francois Mitterrand) yesterday announced the candidates it hopes will give it a majority in a new National Assembly to be elected next month. Mr Mitterrand dissolved the old Assembly, which had a 70-seat Right-wing majority, last week and hopes his party’s 491 candidates will provide a majority able to push through sweeping economic and social reforms. All three past presidents of the 23-year-old Fifth Republic have been able to count on a National Assembly majority. The socialists are fielding a candidate in every constituency in the National As-

sembly elections, to take place on June 14 and 21. Campaigning will open officially on June 1, but all main parties except the Communists have now published lists of candidates. The Rightist alliance of neo-Gaullists and supporters of the former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing have agreed to field joint candidates in. 350 of the 491 seats at stake. They will’fight the remaining seats‘on a primary basis, defeated Right-wing candidates standing down in favour of other Right-wingers for the run-off ballot. This will give the Right a united front from the outset in most constituencies and eliminate the first round infighting seen in the last Assembly election in 1978.

The socialists have bot so far come to any such agreement with the’Communists, who polled 15 per cent of the votes in the first round of the presidential election last month.

Mr Mitterrand did not appoint Communist Ministers to his new Cabinet, but most commentators expect Communists defeated in the first round of the Assembly elections to urge supporters to switch to the socialists in the ■ second poll. The chief worry for socialist campaign managers now is how to sustain the momentum of the swing to the Left. Their line is that voters should take the May 10 presidential decision to ’its logical conclusion and return to a Left-wing Parliament.;’ ' The right argues that the new Assembly should act as a counterweight to socialist power at the Elysee Palace.