Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 22, 1993 TAG: 9303220002
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: PARIS LENGTH: Medium
FRENCH VOTERS OUST SOCIALISTS
Voters fed up with political scandal and high unemployment ousted the Socialists from their control of parliament Sunday and cast their lot with the conservatives.Socialist Party leader Laurent Fabius conceded defeat minutes after the polls closed, saying voters had delivered their verdict and that France faced the most right-wing government in its history.
"The punishment has fallen. It reflects the wear-and-tear of time, of unemployment, of disappointment," Fabius said. "This punishment has been harsh."
Fabius urged supporters to vote for any left-wing candidates in runoff elections next Sunday to block a huge right-wing takeover of parliament.
The likely conservative majority means President Francois Mitterrand, a Socialist, will govern the final two years of his second seven-year term with a hostile prime minister and Cabinet.
The president must choose the prime minister from the National Assembly majority, and the prime minister then picks the Cabinet.
Television networks predicted after the polls closed that the right-wing alliance of the Rally for the Republic and the Union for French Democracy won about 40 percent of the vote. The Socialists got only 19 percent.
The results were confirmed by early offical counts, heralding a massive right-wing takeover of parliament.
After next Sunday's runoffs, the rightist alliance could take from 474 to 484 seats in the 577-member National Assembly, the television network TF-1 projected.
The Socialists would be reduced to a token opposition, dropping from the 273 they now hold to 57-67 seats, the network projected.
"The Socialist Party's mistake is that they promised us the moon in 1981 and haven't delivered," said William Vanseveren, 18, who nevertheless voted Socialist at a polling station in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine outside Paris.
"In the United States, Bill Clinton promised the same thing, but at least he then told the public that he wouldn't be able to carry it all out," said Vanseveren, a firefighter. "The Socialists haven't been that honest."
After the voting was over, Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac, leader of the Rally for the Republic, beamed but warned supporters against overconfidence. He urged them to vote again next week.
His party was projected to win up to 90 seats outright Sunday and be the senior coalition member.
Edouard Balladur, a former finance minister, is widely tapped to become the next prime minister, leaving Chirac free to concentrate on the 1995 presidential election.
The much-talked-about ecologist alliance, which has bled off Socialist support, won only 8.5 percent of the vote, the same as the Communist Party, according to the projections.
The extreme-right National Front, which favors expelling Arab immigrants from France, captured 12.5 percent, about the same as in recent elections, the projections showed.
The remainder of the vote went to smaller parties.
Financial and AIDS scandals, 10.5 percent unemployment and racial tension have led to dillusionment with Socialist politicians, who have controlled the National Assembly for 10 of the past 12 years.
The second round of voting will settle runoffs emerging from the first round, where candidates need 50 percent of the vote to win a seat outright. A record 5,031 candidates, nearly nine for each district, competed on Sunday, so few seats were expected to be decided immediately.
Former Prime Minister Michel Rocard, a Socialist and leading left-wing candidate for the presidency after 1995, called last month for the creation of a broad movement of Socialists, centrists, ecologists and reform-minded Communists.