Word: mitterrand
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...French presidential campaign had begun to resemble a tedious exercise in shadowboxing and issue ducking. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing remained in lofty seclusion behind the ornate iron gates of the Elysée Palace. Socialist Candidate Francois Mitterrand slipped away for tours to the U.S. and China. Neo-Gaullist Jacques Chirac drifted off for a week in the Caribbean. Even Communist Candidate Georges Marchais confined himself largely to preaching to the converted in party districts like Paris' working-class suburbs. Then suddenly last week, the gloves came off and the slugging began...
...Communist Alliance's scorching defeat in the 1978 legislative elections, and the ensuing disarray within France's leftist opposition, had given the impression that Giscard could be re-elected without much effort. As recently as November, polls gave him 59% of the vote in a runoff against Mitterrand, a significant improvement over the paper-thin 50.8% majority with which he was elected in 1974. But the latest surveys show Giscard winning only around 30% in the first round, scheduled for April 26, and 50% to 52% in a second-round runoff against Mitterrand, his most likely final opponent...
...Mitterrand's strategy will be to take advantage of Giscard's weaknesses without calling attention to his own. "We are not under a dictatorship, but no longer quite in a republic," he warned somberly in his kickoff speech before 20,000 faithful at Paris' Porte de Versailles. "We live in a form of disguised monarchy that may no longer be constitutional." But the Socialist leader studiously evades the most awkward question: With whom would he govern, now that the Socialist-Communist Alliance of the '70s is dead? Disingenuously, Mitterrand answers that if elected, he would call...
...Communist Party is not making Mitterrand's task easy. Marchais has recently begun insisting that a Mitterrand government should include Communist ministers, a ploy meant to frighten moderate voters. Paradoxically, as in 1978, France's Moscow-oriented Communist Party feels less threatened by Giscard than by Mitterrand, whose avowed aim is to reduce Communist influence by strengthening the Socialist Party...
...Premier and De Gaulle Aide Michel Debré, 69, further complicates the race. Gaullists, who consider Giscard a usurper, will no doubt favor Chirac or Debré in the first round. Giscard's re-election may depend on how many return to the fold in a runoff against Mitterrand...