Leftists Win Majority in French Parliament

PARIS — The opposition Socialists and their allies swept back into control of France’s Parliament and government Sunday after convincing most of the French that leftist leaders and policies could best protect their jobs, rights and way of life in a fast-changing world.

The No. 1 victim of the vote was President Jacques Chirac, who lost an election that he had called a year early in a risky gamble that the unpopular government of his neo-Gaullists and their center-right allies would manage to squeak through.

Instead, as the mass-circulation newspaper France-Soir headlined in today’s early editions, the French responded unmistakably with “Punishment” for Chirac and his supporters, stripping their parties of nearly half their seats in Parliament.

Official returns showed the left--Socialists, Communists, radical leftists and ecologists--easily won control of the National Assembly with 314 seats to the governing coalition’s 247. Independent conservatives won 15 seats, and the far-right National Front won one seat.

The Socialists again became France’s most important political party in the legislature with 252 seats. But that will not be enough for them to govern alone, and the support of Communist deputies will be necessary to secure an absolute majority of 289 in the 577-seat chamber, the tallies issued by the Ministry of the Interior showed.

Under France’s political system, where executive power is parceled out between a president and a prime minister, Chirac will be forced into uneasy, two-headed political “cohabitation” with a hostile prime minister, almost certainly Socialist Party leader Lionel Jospin, Chirac’s foe in the 1995 presidential election.

The outcome could have profound consequences for Europe, because the Socialists are demanding new conditions for creating a single European currency, along with increased protection for workers and an emphasis on creating jobs for the unemployed.

As twilight fell in Paris, exuberant throngs gathered outside the Socialist Party’s headquarters on the chic Boulevard St. Germain on the Left Bank, dancing in the streets, waving red flags and climbing on the building’s metal gates.

“We won! We won!” thousands chanted joyfully.

The political upheaval was a stunning turnaround from the last parliamentary contest four years ago, when the Socialists, greatly discredited by the first 12 years of the late Francois Mitterrand’s 14-year presidency, managed to win just 63 seats while their foes on the right enjoyed their largest majority in history.

Among leading Socialist politicians elected this time, the mood was intentionally muted. Jospin, who tracked results of the vote with his wife in his assembly district at Cintegabelle, near the Pyrenees in southwestern France, stressed at a victory rally that he was not promising “everything all at once, in which nobody believes anymore.”

Former Industry Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn, widely tipped to be Jospin’s finance minister, said, “France needs a government that will be capable of carrying out priority tasks: the fight against unemployment, against precariousness [of jobs], to construct Europe, to give each the possibility of the personal achievements that he needs.”

Socialist lawmaker Julien Dray said France’s next government will face an “obligation to succeed,” because it will be engaged in a race against widespread social tensions fueled by a jobless rate now at 12.8%.

Sunday’s results were a personal triumph for the stern, bespectacled Jospin, who once again stunned the country with his doggedness and gift for winning the confidence of an electorate that has grown increasingly cynical.

In 1995, the former education minister outscored Chirac on the first presidential ballot and racked up a surprising 47.4% in the runoff, making him the leader of the political opposition.

The French right, which on Sunday saw itself lose its historic majority because of a profound misreading of the popular mood, was stunned and divided by the magnitude of its loss.

“I am disappointed by our defeat, sad for our electors and angry, because I have the conviction that it is not our ideas that were beaten but the way they were defended,” said Nicolas Sarkozy, a former budget minister and one of the few rightist politicians to win election in the first round of voting May 25.

“We did not manage to convince the French people that we were going in the right direction,” admitted outgoing Prime Minister Alain Juppe, who went on television from his Bordeaux district to concede defeat 40 minutes after the polls closed.

Juppe, shown by opinion surveys to be the most disliked prime minister since the Fifth Republic came into being in 1958, won election to Parliament on Sunday, but several other leading figures in the coalition were defeated, including Justice Minister Jacques Toubon, widely discredited for the political use he made of his office, and six other Cabinet ministers.

Giving voice to the ire and discontent on the right, Etienne Pinte, an ally of outgoing Parliament Speaker Philippe Seguin, said it is time to “refound” Chirac’s Rally for the Republic party, which saw its parliamentary holdings plummet to 137 seats from 258.

Profiting from widespread fears among the French about the future, the Socialists have promised to impose conditions on the replacement of the franc by a common European currency; to tax fortunes more heavily and slash value-added taxes on some common purchases; and to abolish plans to privatize state-run enterprises such as France Telecom.

To reduce chronic unemployment, the greatest abiding concern of the French, the Socialists vowed to legislate a reduction of the legal workweek from 39 to 35 hours, without pay cuts, so more people can be hired, and to create 700,000 jobs, half in the public sector, for young people within two years.

Jospin, whose party negotiated France’s adhesion to the 1991 Maastricht Treaty on European union, supports closer European monetary and economic cooperation but opposes imposing yet more austerity measures so his country can meet the strict economic criteria to qualify for the single currency in 1999.

Chirac, who called snap elections April 21, had pleaded against a verdict from the ballot box that would force him to share power, saying that France needed to speak with “a single voice” to defend its interests in Europe.

Although turnout increased Sunday from the first electoral round, from 68.35% to more than 71%, the final result was an even stiffer rebuff for the president.

“A great hope is born,” said Communist Party leader Robert Hue, whose party, once given up for doomed after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, rallied to win 39 seats, 15 more than it had.

Hue said Communists hope to form “a government of the whole left” on the basis of a joint policy declaration signed with the Socialists during the election campaign.

Ecologists allied with the Socialists entered the Parliament for the first time, winning seven seats, the official tallies issued by the Interior Ministry showed.

The National Front, now the third most popular party in France, won just one parliamentary seat--to be held by Toulon Mayor Jean-Marie Le Chevallier--in large part because its voters are scattered throughout the country and not concentrated in certain areas like the less popular Communists.

But analysts said the party badly sapped the outgoing government’s voter base; Jean-Claude Gaudin of the coalition partner Union for French Democracy, whose 206 seats were almost halved to 110, said that, by keeping its candidates in runoffs in districts where the mainstream right already had to contend with leftist opponents, National Front President Jean-Marie Le Pen “has in fact named Lionel Jospin prime minister.”

Former Economics Minister Alain Madelin, who had been expected to resume his former post if the center-right kept power, gloomily predicted that his adversaries will be incapable of solving deep-seated problems in French society and the economy.

“I have the intimate conviction that the policy the Socialists intend conducting is a policy that will lead to failure in this close of the century,” said Madelin, the leading advocate on the right of breaking the centuries-old tradition of government involvement in the economy. “Their victory is not an appetite for the solutions of the Socialists, it’s the defeat of the majority.”