Word: mitterrand
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Blessed with incumbency and lack of a serious challenge from the left, Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, 71, easily captured the front runner's spot in this year's French presidential campaign. The real contest leading up to the first round of voting on April 24 was between his two conservative opponents, Premier Jacques Chirac and former Premier Raymond Barre, who were running neck and neck in the polls as recently as February. This week the campaign moves into its final phase, during which the release of new voter surveys is forbidden. The biggest news in the flurry of last-minute...
...vote in the first round. Chirac and Barre, who had split a 40% share almost evenly in earlier surveys, collected about the same total in this one, but it was weighted in Chirac's favor, 24.5% to 16%. Moreover, while the survey results indicated that Chirac would lose to Mitterrand 48% to 52% in a two-way race, they also showed that Barre would fare worse, losing 46% to 54%. The Le Point findings represented a sharp setback for Barre, 64, who had based his candidacy on the contention that he was the center right's best bet to beat...
...Gaullist Rally for the Republic Party. Barre, by contrast, played down his association with the Union for French Democracy, a loose coalition of center-right parties, and consequently failed to secure a partisan boost. Even though Barre, an economics professor, offered a more trenchant critique of Mitterrand's economic and defense policies than Chirac, all too often he did so in a style better suited to university lecture halls than to political rallies. Said Political Scientist Olivier Duhamel of the University of Paris- Nanterre: "He has spoken Gaullist words but failed to achieve a Gaullist style...
...campaign that has heavily emphasized style over substance, Gaullist imagery cropped up often enough, as it has in past contests, to give an eerie ring of arrived truth to Charles de Gaulle's imperious prophecy that "every Frenchman was, is or one day will be a Gaullist." Mitterrand, an opponent of De Gaulle for the ten years of the general's presidency, also presented himself as an above-the-fray candidate, rarely mentioning the word Socialist and allowing himself to be described by Socialist Party Chairman Lionel Jospin as a leader who acquired popular support "far beyond the normal limits...
...that, Chirac's popularity rating rarely surpasses Barre's and often trails it; a poll for the Paris daily Liberation released last week, for example, indicated that Mitterrand was the first choice of 48% of the electorate, vs. 22% for Barre and 20.5% for Chirac. More important, Barre consistently scores higher than Chirac against Mitterrand alone (though he still comes in second), supporting the former Premier's oft-voiced claim that he offers the center-right its best chance of winning the climactic second round. Still, if Mitterrand enters the race, the La Fontaine fable will have to be rewritten...