Dy rente Turn
Only fifty-eight deputies were elected in the March 4 first-round voting; 442 seats are still up for grabs in the second-round election on March 11. So only a few general tendencies can be gleaned from the first-round results; a full analysis of the whole election must be deferred.
There were about 1.7 million more voters this time than in 1968; the percentage of those abstaining declined somewhat (it was 18.75%, as opposed to 20.04% in 1968 and 19.07% in 1967). There is not yet any information on the composition of the abstainers.
As had been predicted, the outgoing majority suffered a rather serious setback, not only in comparison to 1968 (those were the elections held just after May 1968, in which the Gaullists capitalized on the Communist and Socialist leaders' betrayal of the movement), but also in comparison to the 326
March 1967 elections (in which the Gaullists won a parliamentary majority by only a few seats).
Despite the contribution made by a section of the 1967 and 1968 "centrists" — the Centre Démocratie et Progrès group was merged into the majority coalition after Pompidou became president of the republic— the majority only got about 35% of the vote. Nevertheless, the Gaullists heaved a sigh of relief on the night of the elections; they expected to do worse.
The "reformers" (centrists of various shades), who had hoped for a great success, could not do any better than about 12% of the vote, their usual score. Their only interest in their vote is that it will make them indispensable on the second round for stopping the Union of the Left from getting a majority in the new parliament; but they also will engage in some slick mathe left, that is, giving the SP the same electoral strength as the CP, succeeded in the first phase of his plan. When Mitterrand signed the common program [of the Union of the Left], he suggested that this "rebalancing" would be accomplished by winning back the Socialist votes that had little by little shifted to the CP since the end of the second world war and especially since de Gaulle took power.
In fact, he at best nibbled at a few such votes here and there. In some places, especially in the Paris area, he picked up some votes from the PSU [Parti Socialiste Unifié — United Socialist party]. But most of the SP's gains in areas like the east and west of France were made above all at the expense of the reformers and the Gaullists.
Thus, in the electoral arena the shift to the left worked to the SP's advantage — it picked up support from layers that were formerly apolitical or that followed the bourgeois candidates; the CP made hardly any numerical gains.
In general, the PSU lost groundon the right to the benefit of the SP and also, in several cases, on the left to the benefit of the candidates of Lutte Ouvrière and the Ligue Communiste. It did not preserve its local positions very well, except in Saint- Brieuc, and that because of the PS U's connections with the mayor of the city. Rocard did better than the CP candidate because the SP did not run in the district; on the second round, the CP will step down for him.
As far as the far left is concerned, its percentages, except in a few cases, exceeded those gotten in the 1969 Krivine campaign. They generally ranged between 1.5% and 2.5%; in a few cases the far-left vote was 3%, and in one case it was even 5%.*
In a general sense, the results exceeded our expectations, for we were
*After nearly six months of negotiations with the Ligue Communiste and Lutte Ouvriere over dividing up candidacies, and after starting off by asking for 200 of the districts, the Lambertists of the OCI-AJS [Organisation Communiste Internationaliste-Alliance des Jeunes pour le Socialisme - Internationalist Communist confronted with the voters' desire to "make their votes count" not only to make sure the Union of the Left would win a majority, but also to make sure that either the SP or CP candidate would come out on top in the
Organization-Alliance of Youth for Socialism] broke off all negotiations and pre sented just twenty candidates of their own. They ran above all to fight against the Ligue Communiste and Lutte Ouvriere, putting up their candidates in districts they had not requested, denouncing our candidates as "crypto-Stalinists pushed by the bourgeoisie," and calling for firstround votes for the CP and SP candidates, in addition to their own.
The OCI-AJS thus split from the far left, but could not cut into the SP or CP vote. Result: Everyplace the Lambertists ran, even in cities where they claimed to have hegemony, like Nantes, Clermont- Ferrand, and Grenoble, their candidates were outdistanced, sometimes very much so, by the Ligue Communiste and Lutte Ouvriere candidates. He who spits in the wind gets his nose all wet.
first round. The fact that the far-left vote was spread throughout the whole country proves that its now undeniable presence is not restricted to a few large centers.
One other very important aspect of this election must be mentioned. Every time there was discussion at public meetings, the questions that were posed - especially by the youth, whether voters or not- dealt with socialist society, how to achieve it, how to organize it, and how to run it. The high political level of the problems raised, the concerns of the youth, and often the originality of their suggestions were remarkable.
If ever the considerable cleavage between the parliamentary framework of bourgeois democracy and the politicization of wide layers of the laboring masses was demonstrated, it was in these elections. We will see this again on the second round. March 6, 1973