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No Crisis. Chirac cannot go too far in opposing Giscard without triggering a confrontation that would only weaken the government majority and benefit the left. Moreover, much of the pending legislation in the Assembly was hatched while Chirac was still Premier; this blunts any credible Gaullist opposition to these measures. But the Gaullists will stay arms-length from the President from now on. They may oppose direct elections to a European parliament and object to ratifying the International Monetary Fund accords reached last January in Jamaica, an agreement they view as symptomatic of Giscard's shift to supranationalism. Beyond these skirmishes, the two men are, in the words of Historian Chariot, "condemned to get along." Chirac told Wierzynski, "I will not flail in all directions in an irresponsible manner. So long as there is no major change in the policies of France, so long as I am in the majority, I have no intention of provoking a crisis."
That promise may be hard to keep. The government, for example, chose the day of Chirac's convention to expel striking printers who had been occupying the plant of the daily newspaper Le Parisien Libere for nearly 22 months. The expulsion provoked a nationwide printers' strike, denying Chirac much-needed publicity about his triumph at Porte de Versailles.
Chirac is looking to the legislative elections now scheduled for March 1978. If his clout is decisive in blocking the left from achieving a majority in Parliament, Chirac, the strongman of the majority, will overshadow Giscard and quite possibly unseat him in the 1981 presidential election. At the very least, he has already rekindled the potent mystique of Charles de Gaulle.
*De Gaulle's old 1947 movement was called the Rassemblement du Peuple Français.