FRANCE: A Clean Sweep

▪ 1994

      The left was prepared for defeat; this was a rout. Polls had alerted the Socialists, showing them to be not only behind the right, but even, at times, behind the environmentalists. In the end, they did not come in last, but the results were devastating nonetheless. In the first round, the PS lost half the votes, percentagewise, that it had received in the 1988 elections. In the second round, the right won a crushing majority: 485 of the 577 seats making up the National Assembly; the PS lost 124 seats and the PCF 9.

      Without pause, Pres. François Mitterrand drew the inevitable conclusions. The next day he designated Édouard Balladur, the theoretician of “cohabitation,” Prime Minister. First among the advisors to Jacques Chirac, Balladur knew for months that the head of the RPR did not want to find himself a second time, as in 1986, going head to head with François Mitterrand: the previous confrontation had cost Chirac the 1988 presidential elections. Balladur had thus prepared himself and public opinion. The latter rewarded him for this. On his part, Mitterrand, determined to see his mandate through to its end in 1995, announced that he would not resign and that he would enter the cohabitation “without arms, nor armor, nor fear.” Thus, a courteous cohabitation, but one where foreign policy, the domain of the president since the beginning of the 5th Republic in 1958, will now be shared between the two heads of the executive branch. (CHRISTIAN SAUVAGE)

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