Mitterrand Wins Easily Over Chirac : French President Reelected Despite Foe’s Hostage Acts

Francois Mitterrand, a 71-year-old Socialist all but counted out of French politics a few years ago, soundly defeated conservative Premier Jacques Chirac on Sunday to win reelection to a second seven-year term as president of France.

The victory was so decisive that it eased Mitterrand’s task of dealing with a French Parliament still in the hands of a conservative majority. Many television commentators speculated that Mitterrand would choose Michel Rocard, a non-doctrinaire Socialist long popular with many non-leftist French, to succeed Chirac as premier.

The defeat, though predicted by the polls, was a stinging one for Chirac, 55, who led a conservative coalition to victory in parliamentary elections two years ago but failed to persuade the French voters that he had the vision and even-handedness to serve them as president.

Theatrical Moves

Defeat came despite a flurry of theatrical moves by Chirac during the last week of campaigning that many analysts suspected were fashioned mainly to help carry him to victory. In three days, he completed a deal with Iran that released the last three French hostages in Beirut, ordered army commandos into a nest of separatists on New Caledonia to free 23 hostages at the cost of 21 lives and defied New Zealand by bringing a French secret agent convicted in the bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior home from detention in the South Pacific.

The decisiveness of the acts buoyed French pride, but their recklessness embittered some critics. The returns showed that, if the dramatic acts helped Chirac, they did not help him by much.

With 95% of the votes counted at 12:30 a.m. today, the Ministry of Interior announced the following results:

Mitterrand, 16,017,246 votes (53.99%).

Chirac, 13,647,244 (46.01%).

Little Suspense

There was little suspense election night. Three minutes after all television channels announced at 8 p.m. that their computers predicted the reelection of Mitterrand, Chirac conceded defeat.

“In a democracy, the public is the master, and I bow before its choice,” Chirac said. “I wish good luck to France and good luck to the French.”

But he pointedly did not wish good luck to Mitterrand. After two years of what the French called “cohabitation,” in which the Socialist president and the conservative premier cooperated with almost no acrimony in public, their presidential campaign had ended in great bitterness, with Chirac denouncing Mitterrand during the last week as a liar, a hypocrite, a schemer and a dishonest politician.

The size of the victory appeared to ensure that Mitterrand would not need to cohabit with a conservative any more. The president is expected to name a Socialist as premier, either Rocard or some other politician with broad appeal, as soon as Chirac resigns.

In the past, Mitterrand has promised that his new premier would put together a Cabinet with some non-Socialists to attract enough centrist votes from the present National Assembly to govern. But, if this failed, Mitterrand has said he would call new parliamentary elections.

The first comments from both Mitterrand and the centrists were conciliatory after the victory.

“There is too much anguish, too much difficulty and too much uncertainty for too many in our society for us to forget that our first duty is national solidarity,” Mitterrand said.

Pledge of Cooperation

A kind of pledge of cooperation came from former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, a prominent centrist in the National Assembly. Giscard d’Estaing said that “the worst thing would be a politics of the worst”--a conservative Parliament always opposing a Socialist premier on principle.

“The president is going to name a new government,” Giscard d’Estaing went on. “We will judge it by its acts. One should not decide in advance to vote against it. I will vote for the laws that I find good, and I will vote against the laws that I find bad.”

Chirac, in his concession of defeat, seemed most concerned about re-establishing himself as the leader of the conservatives of France. In the first round of presidential balloting two weeks ago, which eliminated all but the two leading candidates from Sunday’s final round, Chirac finished with 19.90% of the vote while Raymond Barre, a moderate backed by Giscard d’Estaing, received 16.55% and extreme rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen received 14.41%.

This first round vote revealed that French conservatism is badly divided, ranging from moderates evidently ready to work with Mitterrand to extremists preaching hatred for immigrants.

Chirac, in his statement, called on conservatives to continue working for “the new policy based on greater freedom, more justice and improved security” that he had implemented as premier.

Challenge to Chirac

It was obvious, however, that Le Pen, a former paratrooper who blames immigrants for unemployment, crime and some of the other ills of society, was not going to leave Chirac’s leadership unchallenged.

He denounced the traditional conservative parties as “the stupidest right in the world” and derided Chirac for committing “political suicide” by cooperating with a Socialist president for two years.

For Chirac, the defeat confirmed his complete misreading of the legislative election returns of 1986. Since all rightist parties, including that of Le Pen, had won a majority of the votes in that election, Chirac had assumed that, if he could unite that majority of the right this year, he would easily win the presidency.

That strategy failed to take into account a large floating group of independent voters that had mainly voted against the Socialists in 1986 but could not be counted as automatic voters of the right. Also, these voters were often disturbed by some extremist Chirac policies aimed at wooing voters away from Le Pen.

In the end, Chirac never wooed enough Le Pen voters to matter and drove many independent voters into the ranks of Mitterrand.

Politician of the Center

Mitterrand, on the other hand, has been acting for the last three or four years far more as a politician of the center than as a doctrinaire Socialist. He quickly abandoned many of the failed economic policies that his Socialists implemented soon after coming to power in 1981 and tried to act more like a president above the political fray.

At first, it seemed that this change of politics would not work. His popularity declined steadily throughout the first half of his term, reaching a record low at the beginning of 1985, when polls showed that only a third of the French people had any confidence in him.

But, in an ironic way, his party’s defeat in the legislative elections in 1986 enhanced his own popularity. French citizens liked the harmony that seemed to come from a Socialist president and a conservative premier. When the government’s actions did start to displease them, they blamed Chirac, not Mitterrand.

People obviously began to feel comfortable with their Socialist president, and, adopting the joke of a French humor newspaper, they started to call him Tonton, a childish French expression for uncle. Chirac could never break this affectionate tie between Mitterrand and the voters.

A Ferverish Effort

In his feverish effort to catch up with Mitterrand in the last two weeks of the final round of the election, Chirac tried hard to pick up voters from both the extremist Le Pen and the moderate Barre. According to exit polls Sunday, about 40% of Le Pen’s first round voters either abstained or voted for Mitterrand in the runoff while 30% of Barre’s voters either abstained of voted for Mitterrand. These defections were great enough to ensure Chirac’s defeat.

Mitterrand is the first president in the Fifth Republic to be elected twice by direct vote of the people. President Charles de Gaulle was reelected for a second term as president in 1965, but that was France’s first direct vote for president. De Gaulle was elected for the first time by an indirect vote of special electors.