Word: mitterrand
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...Socialists characteristically attributed their shortfall not to Giscard, but to one another. Communist Party Boss Georges Marchais claimed that the left's score would have been higher had the Socialists agreed to Communist proposals for updating the left's Common Program, including a sweeping nationalization of industry. Mitterrand offered his own explanation for the poor showing: "The Communist Party, acting in its own partisan interests, had launched an unjust and inopportune polemical attack on the Socialists that broke the dynamism of the union of the left...
Nonetheless. Mitterrand showed no hesitation in making key concessions to the Communists, in the hope of salvaging a second-round victory. Marchais immediately moved to exploit the Socialists' weakness, exacting from Mitterrand a promise to allocate ministerial posts in proportion to the votes polled by each leftist party. In the event of a leftist victory, this would give the Communists half of the Cabinet seats. Mitterrand even agreed to consider Communists for the ministries of Interior, which controls the police. Defense and Foreign Affairs. These were all concessions that he had previously vowed to deny the Communists...
...exchange for Mitterrand's surrender. Marchais agreed to back better-placed Socialist candidates in the second round. Both men calculated that the combined left parties could still pick up a slim majority in the National Assembly, provided Communist voters could be commanded to back Socialist candidates; at the same time, wavering Socialist voters would be persuaded to vote for Communist candidates in districts where they were stronger than the Socialists...
...trouble with Mitterrand's last-ditch agreement was that it might well serve further to frighten an electorate that was already alarmed at the prospect of increased spending, taxes and inflation that a leftist government might bring. Moreover, many previously undecided voters, and moderate Socialists as well, were astonished at the news of Mitterrand's giveaway of ministries to the Communists. MITTERRAND YIELDS TO MARCHAIS'S DIKTAT, headlined the conservative daily Le Figaro. Premier Barre called the leftist accord a "masquerade," a "deception" and a "masterpiece of evasion...
Undaunted, Marchais and Mitterrand doggedly returned to the campaign trail in the week between the two rounds. Almost desperately, they escalated their campaign rhetoric in an effort to overcome the general sense of anticlimax that had settled over the country. "If the right wins." cried Mitterrand, "there is a great risk of creating in France a climate of the kind that precedes the rise of fascism." For his part, Marchais proclaimed that a victory for the government forces would mean that "tomorrow there will be even more daily difficulties and privation, layoffs and unemployment, authoritarianism and degradation in the quality...