WASHINGTON, May 4 (UPI) -- "Plus ca change, plus c'est la même chose."
There's a reason that this expression -- the more things change, the more they stay the same -- is originally in French, It reflects the realities of France.
And it reflects the reality of the the French presidential
elections (the final vote is Sunday). In fact, the "shocking result" that Jean-Marie Le Pen nosed ahead of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in the first round two weeks ago was in many parts
accidental, but in most others a simple reversion of French politics to its norm.
Political analyst Ali Magoudi is quoted as saying that the real "shock" of the elections comes when you add Le Pen's vote to that of the revolutionary left: "That means at least 30 percent of the population don't recognize themselves in the politics of the country." News flash: anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of the French population has NEVER "recognized themselves" in the democratic politics of the country.
Since 1789, there has always been a portion of the French Right which has never accepted the results of the Revolution, and there has always been a portion of the French Left which thinks that the Revolution was not pushed to its logical conclusion.
The Second French Republic came to an early and abrupt end when its voters voted Napoleon III into power. The Third French Republic was created by suppressing a communard rebellion, and stayed in existence in its first decade despite the fact that there was an anti-Republican majority in the legislature only because that majority couldn't agree on what to substitute for the Republic.
From its foundation after World War I, the Communist Party always attracted more votes from workers than the Socialist Party did, and the French Right used the constitutional devices of the Third Republic to create Vichy France after the French defeat in 1940.
The old problem of an electorate with a huge proportion of non-democratic voters was the doom of the Fourth Republic, as well. With a quarter of the voters voting steadily Communist in all the parliamentary elections between 1945 and 1956, and a series of right-wing challenges, first from Gaullists, then from Poujadists, and finally from right-wing colonists in "Algerie Francaise," the only way democrats in France could keep power was by jimmying the electoral rules to over-represent a "center" which stretched all the way from the French equivalents of Phil Gramm to the French equivalents of Paul Wellstone.
This insured, of course, that most French governments didn't "do much," except whatever these unlikely bedfellows could agree upon.
Charles De Gaulle, when he created the "presidential" Fifth Republic, was trying to get around the weakness of the center by forcing the French electorate into two grand coalitions. And with De Gaulle and his successor Pompidou, and with Francois Mitterand devoting two decades to building an anti-Gaullist coalition of the left, the program seemed to work.
But, as Mitterand turned to the center, it was obvious that his coalition would begin to fragment on its left, and, helped along by Mitterand himself, the French right began to splinter as well.
Once periods of "cohabitation" became common after 1986, the Fifth Republic began to turn into the Fourth Republic. No matter what the voters wanted, they got the same results in governance.
And this in a country whose voters, as Laurence Wylie pointed out a long time ago, have long thought of their vote as "expressive" rather than "instrumental."
Nonetheless, Jospin's elimination in the first round was largely accidental, in the sense that many of the 27 percent of voters who voted to his "left" thought that they had a "free vote" because of the opinion polls that showed him well ahead of Le Pen, and, often, Chirac.
So far from this election marking some change in France, it comes about as close as possible to the results of the election of 1956, the last parliamentary election of the Fourth Republic.
And, classically for France, what some have called mistakenly "an electoral revolution" against cohabitation are almost sure to result in the re-election of Jacques Chirac as president Sunday and, a few months later, of a left majority in parliament.
Cohabitation will continue. Sixty percent of the French public, having expressed its displeasure with Things As They Are, will, in a few months, find that things will remain unchanged.
The more things change ...
