French Presidential election, 1981
Nobody would describe French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing as a charismatic man, and as a President of France, he was not particularly beloved. His political program had been one of cautious but inventive economic conservatism and incremental social liberalism, describing himself and his
Union Democratique Francaise as of the broad center, a thinly inhabited and politically brittle place to stand in any country. He had begun the process of major public infrastructure projects such as a breakneck expansion of France's nuclear energy fleet and massive investments into high-speed rail, while surprising many political observers by pushing hard to legalize abortion, which had collapsed his credibility with the Gaullist right and social conservatives he would need after his excruciatingly narrow 1974 victory over Francois Mitterrand. The position of the UDF as a catch-all centrist liberal party left it exposed to the rhetorical artillery of both left and right, and Giscard - known colloquially as VGE - had seemed a few years earlier to be limping into the 1981 elections, especially as the decent economy of the 1970s eroded once again in the second inflation crisis of 1978-90 mere years after the heels of the traumatic 1973 oil embargo and subsequent energy price shock that had ended France's
Treinte Gloriouses. VGE was not a canny politician and though the French economy had held up better than several Western peers (most notably Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom), stubbornly high unemployment and inflation continued to dog his administration as the May 1981 elections loomed; more than a few detractors derisively called him "France's Gerald Ford." Six months before voters headed to the polls, VGE's chief confidant and Prime Minister, Raymond Barre, made insensitive remarks after a bomb exploded in a Parisian synagogue and killed sixty people, the worst terrorist attack in French history, and the campaign was considered stillborn before it even began after Barre was not cashiered by the UDF.
[1]
That all said, VGE was down, but not out. He had one major advantage that in the spring of 1979 one would never have expected - the effective removal of his two most formidable opponents from the political scene. Mitterrand had died of cancer the previous June less than a year after fending off a challenge from the PS's moderate faction, led by Michel Rocard, who while more popular with the general public was disliked by the PS's traditional left-wing base. Efforts to mend fences had begun in earnest in the wake of the Metz Congress, most notably Mitterrand finding a role for Rocard's close ally Pierre Mauroy, but now with his death it appeared to be a clear path for the
Rocardiens to take over the party, particularly with Mauroy still in the catbird seat thanks to his installation there by Mitterrand before his death, and Rocard was duly made the PS's standard bearer against VGE. Rocard effectively abandoned Mitterrand's soft-socialist
Common Programme for a narrow, targeted Keynesian platform that was more or less just a slightly red-tinted version of VGE's own policy platform with a number of market capitalist and social democratic reforms, aiming for what he called a "new path" between socialism and capitalism that would take the best from both worldviews.
[2] This approach was met with skepticism if not hostility by prominent
mitterandistes such as Lionel Jospin or Laurent Fabius, and much of the private sniping spilled out into public view through juicy newspaper scoops which hobbled Rocard's campaign and boosted the fortunes of the
Parti Communiste Francaise at the PS's expense. The "De Gaulle of the Left" having died had left a leadership vacuum among French social democrats, socialists, and communists, and Rocard in the spring of 1981 was the standard-bearer so many came to very reluctantly.
VGE's bigger concern had always been to his right, however, what with French Presidents in the Fifth Republic having consistently come from some form of conservative background. Despite the narrow win in 1974, men such as outside advisor and European Parliamentarian Jean Lecaunet or young strategist Francois Bayrou considered Mitterrand a washed-up creature of the past irrelevant to the 1980s and actually worried
more about the resurgent Gaullist right which had consolidated into the RPR party, led by VGE's former Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. Chirac was, by French political standards, a young rising star, the hard-charging and bombastic Mayor of Paris who had been sacked from the Ministry in 1976 over disagreements with VGE and replaced by Barre, and had since then used his platform outside the broad center-and-center-right coalition to promote himself, first into the Mayoralty where he had a large and very public platform in the capital and then trying to launch himself into the Presidency in 1981 to vanquish both VGE's tepid centrism and then the left on behalf of the Gaullist movement. Things went awry for the conservative champion, however, when he suffered a devastating car accident in December of 1978 which left him paralyzed from the waist down;
[3] while he had initially used it as a rallying cry, issuing the Call of Cochin (named after the hospital of his convalescence) - a nationalist and euroskeptic policy program intended to imply VGE cared more about European integration than the French people - he had clearly lost a step once wheelchair bound and his long recovery from severe internal injuries blunted his momentum through much of 1979 and the political celebrity he had been rapidly accruing seemed lost.
It was through this remarkably lucky confluence of events that VGE won the most votes in the first round and Rocard narrowly placed ahead of Chirac, who despite a longtime leadership of the RPR would not appear on a Presidential ballot again; in the second round, VGE triumphed by nearly a million votes, with Chirac giving a begrudging endorsement and many more left-wing voters, not seeing any particular difference between the incumbent and the challenger, failing to turn out. A man who had seemed to be a walking corpse politically just a year earlier had earned another term in the
Palais d'Elysees, a remarkable achievement in a country that famously despises its Presidents and where the political spectrum had been polarizing through the 1970s towards two personalities much bigger than his own that he did not have to face head-to-head. The French right had a hobbled champion, and the French left had its feuding factions - it seemed, at least for the short-term, that Valery Giscard d'Estaing's bland, pro-European liberal centrism in the meantime would have to do...
[1] The insensitive remarks are real, but like the Munich bombing the attack here is worse than IOTL, where the bomb went off in the street before it could be placed inside the synagogue
[2] You can make a very credible argument that Rocard was the first person to articulate what in the 1990s became known as Third Way liberalism, and in many ways the Mitterrand of the 1980s IOTL actually did implement a much more moderate, Third Way-adjacent political program to the surprise of his supporters on the left, though that's more because the Mauroy ministry put most of its focus on making welfare programs more accessible/universal than stuff like nationalizations etc like the French left wanted
[3] A real accident, but killing off Chirac too felt cheap to me after doing that with Mitterrand, so wheelchair it is
