French Assailed by Doubt as Election Approaches

MAYENNE, France â€”  You hear it even here, in the provincial France of hard work and thrift and Roman Catholic piety, of dairy farms dotted with grazing black-and-white cows, and quiet country roads marked with hewn wooden crucifixes.

It is Le Doute--doubt. More than three centuries ago, a brilliant Jesuit-taught thinker from the nearby Loire valley, Rene Descartes, made it the departure point of a rationalist world view that every Frenchman and Frenchwoman is now supposed to imbibe from the age of nursery school.

But doubt these days is the finish line to which this nation, which long considered itself more or less synonymous with Western civilization, seems to have collectively come.

“We French are at a crossroads, and the malaise of our society is obvious to us all,� said Patrick Macaire, 39, a Mayenne building foreman with big, calloused hands and an easy, friendly demeanor who has decided to run in elections Sunday and June 1 for the country’s Parliament despite his admitted lack of a program or any ready solutions to his nation’s problems. “We French have no grand plan, no reference point anymore.�

Once proverbially cocksure about their God-ordained place in the cosmos, the people of France are now more likely to be worried, perplexed and wary. As a nation, they no longer know where they are going, what kind of society they want, who to trust or how France will fit into a fast-changing Europe.

And what, as a matter of fact, about Europe? In September 1992, a razor-thin majority of 50.95% of French voters approved the Maastricht Treaty on European economic and political union in a referendum. But as the prospect of a single currency looms closer, more and more French are skittish about deeding increased control over their lives to the faraway Eurocrats of Brussels.

Passionate Polarization

Throughout the centuries, the French have passionately polarized themselves--into Catholics and Protestants, royalists and republicans, Orleanists and Bonapartists, anti-clericals and defenders of religion, Petainists and Gaullists, right and left. Politics have mattered. But do they still? Many doubt it.

“Whether the right or left is elected, they will turn the screws and demand more sacrifices from simple working people,� Jean-Pierre Faucon, 27, a dairy farmer in Mayenne, said with a shrug.

So, with Le Doute as its unwanted but persistent companion, France will go to the polls, called there by President Jacques Chirac to elect a new National Assembly as he begins the third year of a seven-year term.

“It’s time to take a new step,� Chirac has told the French, explaining why he called an election 10 months early.

He asked voters to give a “shared elan� to his effort to transform a conservative society into a freer one with less taxation and less government, and one eligible for the first round of countries admitted to the single European currency next year.

But never has the elite, including the semi-caste the French call the “political class,� been so suspect or despised, or so seemingly incapable of delivering what it promises. The mandarins who still run France have been besmirched by repeated corruption scandals and multibillion-dollar oceans of red ink at Air France, Credit Lyonnais bank, GAN insurance and other state-owned enterprises.

The acts of Chirac himself, one recent opinion poll found, are judged “satisfactory� by just 22% of voters. Though feisty, dynamic and as affable as a French peasant talking about this season’s crop to his neighbors down at the village cafe, the 65-year-old neo-Gaullist from rural Correze in central France has singularly failed to deliver on his campaign pledge to bridge France’s “social fracture� and reconcile social justice and economic growth.

More than 3.1 million French are jobless, more than ever before. Strikes and demonstrations break out whenever authorities try to trim costs in the generous welfare system or at sick state-owned companies so they can boost growth. Hundreds of thousands of young French people have never worked in their lives, while other citizens have been out of a job for decades.

The French, meanwhile, have the dubious honor of supporting the most lavishly spending state bureaucracy in the G-7 group of leading industrialized nations. No less than 54.1% of the national wealth (versus 33% in the United States) is gobbled up and spent by French officialdom.

Will things change? Even the incumbents say they must. Former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, founder of the center-right Union for French Democracy and archetype of the chilly and aloof clan that has run this country’s affairs for decades, said recently, “France must be governed otherwise.�

Can it be? In Mayenne, a riverside town about 140 miles southwest of Paris whose incumbent legislator belongs to Giscard’s party, third-generation cider maker Yann Volcler, 47, is a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic. Heavy taxes and state-imposed charges to help pay for government-subsidized health care and other employee benefits dear to the French whittle down the profit margin on his $12 million in sales to 3.5%, he said.

Volcler is now pondering whether it wouldn’t be smarter to simply sell his 45-employee cider press and bottling plant, stash the proceeds in a Swiss bank at 10% interest and move somewhere abroad easier to do business. “I’m bullish about my business. Not about France,� he said.

Brice Lalonde, a former Socialist government minister who now leads an independent ecological party, is also dubious about the ability of mainstream politicians--a “new nobility,� he calls them--to evolve. “With the right, it’s a couple of million unemployed; with the left, it’s a couple of million unemployed,� Lalonde said.

With such a morose state of affairs after 14 years of the late Francois Mitterrand’s Socialist presidency and four years of day-to-day government by back-to-back rightist premiers, Edouard Balladur and Alain Juppe, one might expect that a majority of the French would wholeheartedly embrace change.

But it’s not the case.

Chirac and Juppe, who is even more unpopular than the president, now talk about the need to cut red tape, curtail government spending and free up economic entrepreneurs to let their ventures rip. Ordinary people, left and right, are suspicious.

A surprise bestseller this season has crystallized the widespread fears about France’s future as cherished benefits of the welfare state are stripped away by impersonal market forces, which some of the French see as an “Anglo-Saxon� import inimical to French ways. The book’s title tells it all: “L’Horreur Economique.�

So, though the French are unhappy about the present, they seem even unhappier about what may lie ahead. “France isn’t bored. She is stuck in a rut,� a group of political scientists recently wrote in Le Monde newspaper. “Worse than that, she is turning in circles.�

And, like the country’s pop music industry, the political class is once again offering voters well-known faces, though the lyrics this time are somewhat different.

Juppe’s governing center-right coalition is asking again for people’s trust. But his two years in office have made the balding, 51-year-old mayor of Bordeaux so disliked that even in his own fractious majority, some of his ostensible allies mutter about replacing him.

The opposition Socialists, who lost control over the National Assembly in the last legislative election in 1993, also want another chance. “Let’s change futures� is the campaign catch-phrase of the party led by former economics professor Lionel Jospin, 59.

With the Communists as their restive allies, the Socialists promise more tax-financed pump-priming to help create 700,000 jobs, and want to further kick-start economic growth by negotiating an increase in wages and a reduction in working hours, from 39 to 35 hours a week.

But not only is the Socialists’ competence widely suspect after 14 years of Mitterrandie, which seems to lose its luster weekly, but Jospin’s program flies in the face of a Europe-wide trend, spectacularly illustrated in the May 1 landslide by the revamped Labor Party in Britain, that shows old ideas no longer have much appeal.

In a Dead Heat

Given the mood, no political or economic vision can now rally a convincing majority of the French. The last opinion polls allowed before this Sunday’s vote showed the majority and the opposition in a dead heat in the first round, with around 39% of the vote each.

The center-right should win another majority in Parliament, but its margin of victory could be as slender as 30 to 40 seats--a real comedown from 1993, when center-right parties swept up all but 93 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly for their most resounding victory since 1958.

This time, despite Chirac’s plea, there shouldn’t be any elan to speak of. For when you ask the French whom they believe, the answer you now get from many is: nobody.

“There have been plenty of promises over the years, that’s for certain,� said Pierre Faucon, a massive, amiable 50-year-old who works the farm on Mayenne’s outskirts with his son Jean-Pierre, producing 400,000 quarts of raw milk a year that they sell to a cooperative. “But look at what has been done. The promises were nothing but wind.�