Relaxed President for a Tense New Era

Fireworks lit up the election-night sky as middle-class voters swarmed up the Champs-Elysees on foot, aboard motor bikes and clinging to the tops of cars. They waved the Tricolor and shouted, "Giscard `a la barre! [Giscard at the helm!]." Over in the Left Bank student quarter, meanwhile, small knots of young people gathered under the watchful gaze of riot police to shout sullenly, and absurdly, "A victory for fascism!" Such were the sharply distinct reactions to longtime Finance Minister Valery Giscard d'Estaing's knife-edge victory over Socialist Franc,oise Mitterrand in France's presidential runoff last week.

In fact, the record 27 million voters who went to the polls had given Giscard the narrowest possible victory margin. Just as the remarkably accurate polls had predicted, the outcome hinged on the swing of a few hundred thousand votes in the narrow, shifting center of France's sharply polarized political spectrum. Giscard won possession of the Elysee Palace for the next seven years with a bare 50.8% majority, or some 423,000 votes.* A small swing to the left might easily have made Mitterrand the winner, and given France its first left-wing government since Leon Blum's Popular Front of the 1930s.

Open Style. While the vote was a near standoff, it did bring Giscard to power with a clear mandate for social and economic reform. In a conciliatory, low-keyed victory speech that seemed aimed as much to Mitterrand's crestfallen leftist backers as to his own supporters on the right, Giscard said: "I have understood in this campaign that you wanted change. You will not be disappointed." Giscard also promised French voters that they would be "surprised at the breadth and rapidity" of the changes he would bring to France after 16 years of conservative Gaullist rule. Those changes will begin to take shape this week, when the new President announces his choice for Premier and holds his first meeting with a Cabinet that will include some young faces--and possibly even some women.

Whatever the substance of his reforms, Giscard has already made it apparent that he will bring an open new style to the Elysee. It will contrast sharply with the Olympian manner patented by De Gaulle and copied, with minor modifications, by Georges Pompidou right up through the fatal end of his never-acknowledged struggle with cancer eight weeks ago. On election night, Giscard not only pointedly offered "a very cordial salute" to Mitterrand but did so in English as well as French--a cultural heresy that raised eyebrows even on the political left. Said former Premier Pierre Mendes-France, a Mitterrand supporter: "Yes, I can see it now. France will become the 51st state before Puerto Rico."

Other eyebrow-raising innovations are coming, including Giscard's plans for this week's inauguration ceremony at the Elysee. Male guests were asked to leave their striped pants at home and come in ordinary business suits. Giscard, who will be wearing a suit instead of the traditional white tie and tails, planned to forsake the usual armada of limousines and motorcycles and arrive at the palace on foot. There he would review not the silver-helmeted Garde Republicaine but a unit of the First Army's Second Dragoon Regiment, in which he served as a tank gunner during World War II. When he later makes the ceremonial visit to the tomb of the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe, the new President will walk up the Champs-Elysees instead of being driven there by limousine.

Giscard evidently hopes that a less-stiff presidential style will soften his image as a remote aristocrat living in a world of economics dossiers. Above all, a "more relaxed" presidency, Giscard feels, could help reduce the social tensions of a polarized nation.

Overdue Reform. The "two Frances"--one privileged, modern and optimistic, the other poor, neglected and burdened with grievances--that were etched so sharply in the election results are a product of the unevenness of the remarkable prosperity of the Gaullist years. The robust French economy has almost tripled in size since 1962, and some analysts predict that it will pass West Germany's by 1980 or 1981. Yet France's rising gross national product has mainly benefited the slowly expanding middle class and the country's pampered farmers, who voted overwhelmingly for Giscard. Prosperity has largely bypassed the aged, struggling to live on fixed pensions at a time of 18% inflation, and the wage earners: two-thirds of France's 20 million workers struggle along on annual incomes of $4,800 or less. Salaries of upper-level executives average 4.6 times as much as blue-collar wages--the highest spread between employer and employee income in Europe.

Millions of French families live without the conveniences common to other industrial economies. One out of three French homes is officially considered to be "overpopulated"; 28% have no hot water, 55% are without baths and 77% lack telephones. Because French governments have devoted less of the country's gross national product to social services than any other major Common Market country, France is plagued with inadequate hospitals, schools and roads. Meanwhile, tax reform is long overdue: a typical tax bill for a French factory employee who earned $10,000 last year would be $756, compared with $291 for a physician or other professional person, $260 for a shopkeeper and nothing at all for a farmer. Thus the French worker has come to expect little from a capitalist, conservative society, and he puts all his faith on changing France's form of government.

Mitterrand, who remains head of France's Socialist Party despite his defeat, has promised that the left will give Giscard "neither a pause nor a truce." He plans to force the President to make good on every one of his promised social reforms. This could be troublesome, for Giscard's reforms--among them, an immediate increase in the minimum wage from $226 to $260 a month --would cost the French economy more than $4 billion a year at a time when the country is already borrowing heavily just to pay for its Arab oil.

Even if the leftist-dominated unions hold off on strike activity until after the August holidays, Mitterrand and his allies can make trouble for Giscard in the National Assembly, where the Socialists and Communists hold 174 of the 490 seats. With only 55 seats in the hands of his own Independent Republican Party, Giscard needs the support of the Gaullists (183 seats) and some Centrist deputies if he is to govern effectively. The Gaullists have never cared for Giscard, who broke with the party in the 1969 referendum on regional reform that led to De Gaulle's fall from power; they say that they will give his regime varying "degrees of support," depending on the issues.

Magic Moment. One thing that Giscard will have going for him in his dealings both with the left and with the Gaullists is the fact that he has very few political debts to pay. Though he had served Gaullist governments almost continuously since 1962, when De Gaulle named him Finance Minister at the blindingly early age of 36, Giscard managed to cast himself as the candidate of "change without risk." Even more remarkable was Giscard's personal transformation. For years his image had been that of an aloof technocrat--a man who, as one longtime colleague put it, could not even give audiences the "impression of belonging to the same race" as their own. Giscard appeared to become a different and much warmer man after he brought his attractive family into the campaign, a major innovation in French politics (see box page 23). He also displayed a personal magnetism that came across especially strong on television.

"The magic moment when the candidate and the public merged came at the end of the first week of the campaign," reported TIME Correspondent George Taber. "The curious crowds suddenly turned into rabid fans, and voters began reaching out to touch his tailored sleeves. The man who had been a cool and respected Finance Minister suddenly found himself carried on a wave of popular enthusiasm for the first time in his career. He responded with a warmth that had been rarely seen in public. His plunges into the crowd became a ritual. With almost disbelieving delight, he told a crowd in Nantes: 'At the beginning of this campaign, everyone thought it would be a predictable election with people voting the way they always did. But something happened that threw off the experts. There appeared a new popular current within our people around my candidacy.' "

The question is whether Giscard will be able to keep those currents flowing with him after he settles in at the Elysee. For a man who has been in public life for so long, he is, apart from his fiscal views, a surprisingly unknown quantity. Some political analysts, like L'Express Editor Jean-Franc,ois Revel, feel that Giscard has proved himself a good Finance Minister and therefore will be a good President, a man who sees with clarity the problems and needs of his people. Others are not so sure. "Giscard never had a vision of the social problems of France in this campaign," says Maurice Duverger, a left-wing French political scientist. "He always sees everything in terms of the Finance Minister. Up to now he was always the second man, who was usually breaking social progress for budget reasons. Now he will be the master. But I don't think he has the human dimension for it."

Cold Civil War. Certainly Giscard has been offered an invitation to greatness. For nearly two decades, his country has stood as a near-perfect model of stability in Western Europe. But it was a stability achieved at the cost of political atrophy. With his victory, Valery Giscard d'Estaing will bring a new generation into French political life. He is a modern practitioner of politics who wants to lay to rest the long cold civil war between the French left and right. To succeed, Giscard must persuade the other, less affluent half of France to follow him on his promised new course.

*A margin of victory almost as slim as that which decided the U.S. election of 1960, in which John Kennedy squeezed out a plurality of 49.7% to beat Richard Nixon (49.5%) by just 118,550 votes.

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