Mitterrand’s dream, bosses’ nightmare

Press, 20 January 1982, Page 19

Mitterrand’s dream, bosses’ nightmare

From

ROBIN SMYTH

in Paris

After a seven-month forced march towards socialism, France is movings into strange country as the changes decreed by Francois Mitterrand take shape. In 1982. the French will see rise around them the new nationalised banks and industries. new decentralised form of local government, new relations between workers and employers. The working week will become shorter and the prospect of retirement will draw closer. President. Mitterrand was plainly a happy man when he sat in a corner of the Elysee Palace library early in December and gave a progress report to television viewers. He has been struck by none of the disasters predicted by his opponents before his victory in May. From being the political warrior who always lost in the final contest for power, he has become the most

secure of European leaders. German social democracy falters; Spanish.democracyjs cruelly shaken; the British economy stumbles further downhill; Belgium seems closer than ever to falling apart; but Mitterrand is set fair to 1988 with an overwhelming Socialist National Assembly majority until 1986. The French President speaks to the outside world with the same authority as his predecessors. The four Communist Ministers in his Cabinet may have put certain Western governments on. their guard, but the style of French diplomacy has not been noticeably cramped. Indeed, Mitterrand has managed to fascinate Washington with a policy which is an intriguing mixture of hawk and dove. At home, impatient workers have not occupied their factories demanding

more than the Government can yield. The conservative forces which ruled f0r.,,.50 long rage against the new. order, but at present they have no more impact than wildly gesticulating figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Certainly there are stirrings of discontent. Groups of doubters have formed on the Right and the Left. The perennial dissatisfaction of French farmers with what they consider the pittance that any Government feels able to offer in the way of subsidies has in recent weeks erupted in violent rioting in country towns. The Communist Party has shown in the Polish crisis that its nriembership of a Socialist Government has not . tempered its old views. It is clear to Socialists that their t Communist allies are with 1 them only so Jong as Mitterl rand’s star, remains high.

The first months of Socialism have been strewn with outsize Ministerial blunders and some notable retreats from old slogans and promises. The reduction of national service from one year to six months has been abandoned as impracticable. Ecologists who thought that Mitterrand was on their side are furious to find that after a temporary shutdown of a few nuclear power stations, President Giscard's nuclear power programme is now going forward at full speed with few cuts. If some of the exhilaration has worn off since the election in May, the main column of Socialist voters has held together. They retain their trust in the new venture despite the lack of

any sign as yet that the Government will succeed in turning back unemployment from the two million mark passed in the autumn, or of forcing down inflation which over the past year stood at a predictable blit unacceptable 14 per cent. Without victories on these two fronts other reforms will be valueless. Yet it is here that any socialist experiment in the West runs into difficulties. Mitterrand stressed to his TV interviewers that it was socialism he was aiming for and not social democracy. He is determined to change the country's economic and social structures, and not just to share out the proceeds of capitalism more evenly. However, Mitterrand knows that the road to vic-

tory over unemployment lies through a spectacular upturn in the French economy. This can be achieved only if the country’s employers in the private sector wage the capitalist struggle with more boldness and fervour than they have shown under capitalism. Can hard-pressed employers be expected to take risks — to invest and create new jobs — if the party in power is denouncing them as the class enemy and the Government is so obviously preparing to sacrifice them to the new society as soon as it is safe to do so? As Pierre Mauroy. the Prime Minister,' toured the provinces recently he passed demonstrations of trade unionists chanting “Make the employers pay.” In Grenoble, hundreds of employers marched through the streets with banners pleading "Let us live.”

The Government's attitude to the employers alternates between exasperation and reassurance. In the eyes of most Socialists the employers are ungrateful, timorous, or wilfully obstructive. But Jacques Delors, the popular Finance Minister, decided that the business community had a case. He proposed openly that the Government should call a “pause" in its breathtaking programme of reforms. Prime Minister Mauroy's response was an emphatic refusal to slow down the Socialist bandwagon. It was left to Mitterrand to adjudicate the quarrel on the TV screen. The President expressed affection and support for both Mauroy and Delors, but his bland verdict came down closer to the former. There would be no pause, he said, until the programme he had promised before his election

had been achieved. But then there would be a kind of breathing space, for he assured the employers that there would be no further nationalisations until a new Parliament and a new President took over with a mandate over which he (Mitterrand) had no control. The President drew a tactful veil over his own longdistance objective, but a journalist who has interviewed and closely studied him, Roger Priouret, economic correspondent of the Left-wing “Le Nouvel Observateur,” writes: “Today, Mitterrand's secret wish, his dearest dream, is that at the end of his seven-year term the French will be sufficiently persuaded of the soundness of his policy to elect another Socialist President who will go further along the same course.”— Copyright. London Observer Service.