PARIS, June 16 (UPI) -- Just 55 years ago, a general strike called by the French Communist Party looked briefly as if it might topple the government and install a pro-Soviet regime.
Throughout the 1970s, the Party regularly won over 20 percent of the vote, and for the past five years, in coalition with the Socialists, the Communists have been part of the government of France.
But as France's 40 million voters go to the polls Sunday for the fourth and decisive round in this season of presidential and parliamentary elections, the Communist Party leader, Robert Hue, is fighting desperately to cling to his seat in the National Assembly -- and looks likely to lose.
He is not alone. The Communists, once a solid block of a 100 or more deputies in the parliament, will be lucky to see 20 of their number gather this week when the new Assembly convenes -- the threshold required for a block of deputies to become a formal parliamentary group. With barely 4 percent of the national vote, and its traditional industrial base among miners and steelworkers eroded by modernization and closures, the French Communists appear doomed.
Worse still for the 'pluralist Left' (as France calls the coalition of Socialist, Greens and Communists who comprised the last government), the Communist Party might not be the only former leader to be evicted from parliament. Francois Hollande, the new Socialist leader after the humiliation of former prime minister Lionel Jospin at the hands of the extreme right-wing national Jean-Marie Le Pen in April, is also facing an uphill struggle for re-election.
Also fighting for her political life is Dominique Voynet, the Green leader and former minister. And so is Jean-Claude Chevenement, former Minister of Defense and of the Interior, in what was once his unassailable power base of Belfort. The French left is facing not just a defeat, but a rout.
The French right, by contrast, is already haggling over the division of the spoils. Ten days ago, President Jacques Chirac's two key lieutenants, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and former Premier Alain Juppe, met for a private dinner. Reports and rumors of the encounter are already circulating, and this meal between the two rivals a successor for Chirac's throne is beginning to sound like the famous dinner of Tony Blair and Gordon Blair at London's Granita restaurant when they decided the leadership of Britain's Labor party.
Raffarin, plucked from provincial obscurity by Chirac six weeks ago to lead his government into the elections, proposed that Juppe should assume the presidency of the National Assembly "so that the third figure in the state should benefit from the prestige worthy of a future candidate to become president of France."
Juppe, it is said, smiled warily and shook his head, adding, "If you succeed, you will be the natural candidate to succeed Chirac in 2007."
Juppe decided instead to take over the direction of the new party of the right, the UMP (Union for a Presidential Majority). This attempt to build a broad conservative coalition to ensure that Chirac's presidency would be accompanied and reinforced by a reliably conservative Assembly, was swiftly cobbled together by Chirac and Juppe over the last two months.
This attempt to bring together the various factions of the center-right, including Gaullists and free marketers and what other countries might call Christian Democrats, has been about 90 percent successful. Only the centrist UDF (Union for French Democracy) led by Francois Bayrou remains outside, and it has been reduced to a dispirited and possibly doomed rump.
Running this new party (while remaining Mayor of Bordeaux) will give Juppe a powerful springboard to the succession because of the way public money is used to finance the French political system, based on the number of votes obtained in the last elections. The 8.6 million votes won last Sunday by the UMP guarantee Juppe's new party an annual income from the state of $13 millions a year. And the block of 350 deputies in the National assembly will bring another $15 million a year into the new party's coffers.
With control of that kind of money, plus the party machine with its ability to steer the selection of candidates, Juppe should be able to build a party perfectly tailored to his ambitions -- whatever Prime Minister Raffarin may achieve in office.
Beyond personalities and power, there are principles at stake. Raffarin is a natural conciliator, a business school-trained administrator suspicious of ideologies. Juppe, by contrast, wants root and branch reform of France -- and the defeat of its powerful labor unions -- on a scale that could make him France's version of Margaret Thatcher. But Juppe tried and failed before, in his brief premiership of 1995-97 when his reforms were blocked by a general strike, and he lost the subsequent election.
Whether Juppe can try again, or whether Raffarin's compromises will carry the day, will be decided more by the outcome of their private dinner than by anything the demoralized and defeated left can do -- unless they can find a new and combative identity in the strikes and demonstrations they will mobilize against the plans of the new conservative primacy.
