Word: messmer
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Pompidou, whose presidential term still has three years to run, solemnly pledged to defend France's democratic institutions: "I am obliged to state that the Communist and Socialist proposals will completely overthrow those institutions." If such a possibility seemed remote to French voters, Gaullist Premier Pierre Messmer stressed the presumed economic consequences of a leftist sweep. He predicted a "chain reaction" of increased unemployment, a balance of payments deficit, loss of foreign markets and trouble for the franc...
What will President Georges Pompidou do if the Gaullists win next month's parliamentary elections? According to one highly imaginative scenario that political observers in Paris are currently debating, his first step will be to sack lackluster Premier Pierre Messmer, 56, and appoint in his stead Minister of Finance Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, 47. As it happens, the suave, non-Gaullist Giscard is regarded as Pompidou's arch rival for the 1976 presidential elections. Last week he came in a close second to former Premier Jacques Chaban-Delmas in a nationwide popularity poll...
...Common Market referendum that Pompidou too cleverly planned as a kind of national vote of confidence. Then came the scandals-notably the flap over former Premier Jacques Chaban-Delmas's tax returns (TIME, Feb. 14)-the Cabinet shuffles and the gray replacements. Chaban-Delmas's successor, Pierre Messmer, a colorless veteran of De Gaulle's Cabinets, made his debut in the Pompidou government in a saccharine and self-serving interview on the government TV network that left many Frenchmen with what Le Monde sadly described as a feeling "of embarrassment, almost of shame...
French President Georges Pompidou has no plans to meet any of the 135 delegates at Orly Airport; that chore has been assigned to lackluster Premier Pierre Messmer and Foreign Minister Maurice Schumann. "Everything is being done," explained a government spokesman, "to ensure that this will be strictly a working meeting," an attitude that squares with Pompidou's crisp observation that the European Economic Community has "already drunk the champagne" of British entry...
Disease. Gaullist reaction to the disclosures verged on hysteria. Prime Minister Pierre Messmer denounced Aranda for "acting against morality and against the law." Pompidou, in one of his semiannual press conferences last week, lamented that photocopying had become "a disease of our times" -though he promised to check carefully on the integrity of Gaullist candidates in next March's parliamentary elections...