April 17, 2002 Trotskyist on a First-Name Basis to France By SUZANNE DALEY
PARIS, April 16 — Vendors selling "workers unite" pamphlets and books with titles like "Being a Bolshevik after the Bolsheviks" lined the long walk from the subway station to the auditorium where the presidential candidate known simply as Arlette was about to speak.
Waiting for a crowd of more than 5,000 to settle into their seats, Arlette, whose last name is Laguiller, was amiably taking questions from the news media. In another setting, she would pass as someone's down-to-earth granny. Her hair is short. She wears sensible, lace-up shoes and sometimes looks remarkably vulnerable.
She is not, however, to be underestimated.
This year, she has turned out to be a surprisingly sharp thorn in the side of the left-wing political establishment. Polls show that this retired, Trotskyist typist may get as much as 10 percent of the votes in the first round of the presidential elections set for Sunday.
That could mean third or fourth place in a field of 16 candidates — ahead of both the candidates for the Communist Party and the Greens, the two left-wing parties that have been junior partners in the ruling government coalition for the last five years. The likely winners of the Sunday vote, President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, are expected to garner just 18 to 22 percent each.
Ms. Laguiller, 62, has run for the French presidency four times before, but never gotten more than 5.3 percent of the vote. Her recent success sometimes seems to overwhelm her. When she finally took the stage here recently the crowd roared and roared, waving huge red banners.
"Stop, stop," she said after a few minutes. "You are going to make me cry."
Her pitch does not vary much. Her key positions include blocking profits and raising salaries, reserving public funds for public services and banning lay-offs.
"Most of the candidates are socially and politically in the camp of the bourgeoisie," she says. "They are competing only to better the affairs of the bosses, the managers, the businessmen and the bankers.
"Me, I am from the workers' camp. It is their interest — moral, material and social — that I want to defend."
No one really believes that 10 percent of the French want the overthrow of the Fifth Republic, leaving analysts to puzzle over the reason for her support.
Some say it is her sheer familiarity. She has been in the public eye for more than 30 years. The French have watched her progress from a trendy militant in a leather jacket to a dowdy pensioner. A recent survey in the magazine Elle found she was the one candidate with whom voters would feel most comfortable sharing their problems.
Others say voters are attracted to her integrity. Her message has never changed, and she seems to live what she preaches. She owns virtually nothing and contributes her salary as a member of the European Parliament to her party, the Workers' Struggle.
Still others say her support is a measure of the disgust that French voters bring to the election this year. Surveys show that as many as 70 percent of voters wanted to see a new face in the mix. But the final vote on May 5 is expected to be a rerun of the 1995 election, with Mr. Chirac and Mr. Jospin facing off again.
At first, France's political establishment seemed inclined to nod indulgently in Ms. Laguiller's direction. But as her popularity climbed, the elbowing got ruder. Last month, key officials of the Greens wrote an article in a major daily, Libération, calling the Workers' Struggle party a sect. Ms. Laguiller is suing for slander, but the article has put a spotlight on accusations that the Workers' Struggle, one of three Trotskyist parties in France, is a shadowy and unaccountable organization.
Pressed in a recent television interview over claims that her party also discouraged members from marrying so they could be more dedicated to the cause, she burst into tears.
But on stage recently, Ms. Laguiller railed against all those accusations, and what she called the unfair coverage of her campaign this year. She said journalists had consistently undercounted the number of people at her rallies. She should, she said, get a prize for being the "most frequently insulted candidate in the race."
Nevertheless, Ms. Laguiller has let journalists into her home. In a recent issue of the magazine Gala, Ms. Laguiller was photographed in her tiny subsidized apartment in the Paris suburb of Seine-St.-Denis. She posed in her living room holding a biography of Trotsky and at the stove in her minuscule kitchen, stirring soup in a well-worn pot.
In the article, she also denied that she was a lesbian, though she added that if she were she would say so without hesitation. "I have a man in my life, a man I love," she said. "But I keep him hidden."
Other candidates in this year's highly splintered presidential runoff have already begun their negotiations for eventual positions in the winner's cabinet. But Ms. Laguiller says she has no intention of parlaying her votes into a cushy seat in anyone else's government.
She says she would be happy just knowing her numbers were high.
"If the polls are right, and I want to be very cautious about that, then this will be a vote that will strengthen the morale and the will to fight among workers," she said. "And that will make it very important." [end]