BRITISH PRESS COMMENT ON FRENCH ELECTION RESULTS

Grey River Argus, 24 March 1949, Page 3

BRITISH PRESS COMMENT ON FRENCH ELECTION RESULTS

LONDON, March 22.

The Manchester Guardian says that supporters of the de Gaullist Rally of the French People criticise “with indignation” the Ministry of the Interior's official statistics on the elections. The Rally claims that many “independent” candidates recommended by Rally headquarters have been counted as Right Wing Government supporters. Since not all the municipal councillors or members of the Upper House elected in 1947 and 1948 with de Gaullist support have proved docile to the whip, it is unlikely that any accurate statistics can be provided. Many “independents” counted wholesale as Government supporters were so only in the sense that they were mainly campaigning on local issues and not troubling to attack the Government.

A more serious ground for not taking the official figures as a complete picture of the French public opinion is that, while in all other departments half the cantons voted, there was no election in Seine (Greater Paris), which has a population of 5,000,000. The Manchester Guardian says the Government parties cannot feel happy about the results. The Socialists have sunk from 18.65 per cent, of the votes cast in November, 1946, to 16.8 per cent., the Radicals from 11.5 per cent, to 11.12 per cent., and the M.R.P. (from whose former followers de Gaulle has drawn the bulk of his) from 26.23 per cent, to 8.06 per cent.

“The firm conclusions can be drawn from Sunday’s first ballot in the departmental elections,” says the Paris correspondent of the Daily Telegraph; “First, the trend to the Right which started in the municipal elections in the autumn of 1947 has continued. Second, General de Gaulle’s Rally of the French People is to-day the biggest single political force in • France. It is also apparent that the ordinary Frenchman has preferred to vote for the man he knew rather than the representative of a party.”