ABSTRACT
The November 1962 elections gave the Gaullist-Giscardian coalition 36 per cent of the first-round vote and 268 out of 482 Deputies. They gave French voters that link between electoral choice and the composition of the executive which had been so conspicuously lacking under the Third and Fourth Republics. They gave France the first stable parliamentary majority in the history of any Republic: Pompidou lasted a record six years as Prime Minister, and commanded parliamentary forces sufficiently disciplined for him not to need the most draconian power in the constitutional armoury, Article 49-3, during the whole of the 1962 parliament (see Chapter 6). For Jean Charlot, the Gaullists of the de Gaulle and Pompidou presidencies represented France’s ‘dominant’ party. In a French context this term is comprehensible, so remarkable was the contrast with the Fourth Republic, in terms of voting patterns, of the conduct of parliamentary business, and of the concentration of ministerial posts and patronage in the hands of one party. But the Gaullists’ ‘dominance’ was still relative. Their 44 per cent of the vote at the first ballots of presidential elections (de Gaulle in 1965 and Pompidou in 1969), and between 33 per cent and 38 per cent at parliamentary elections, were strong results, but no more indicative of ‘dominance’ than those of the German CDU or either of the big British parties. This was not Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party or Japan’s Liberal Democrats. Moreover, the dilution of the Gaullists’ positions in the parliamentary majority of 1973, and above all the very poor result of their candidate Chaban-Delmas, in the first round of the 1974 presidential elections, drew a fairly speedy close to what had been the hegemony of little more than a decade. At least as important as the Gaullists’ (partial) dominance was the slow process of bipolarisation of the party system, as the left-wing parties understood that, to beat the Gaullists, they needed an alliance at least as coherent as the governing coalition. Hence the signature of the Left’s Common Programme in 1972. At the same time the centrists felt increasingly squeezed between the Gaullists and the Left.
