26
RICE UNIVERSITY STUDIES
“Perspectives et Réalités” (in accordance with current French political fash-
ions), and fought hard, though unsuccessfully, for the right to run Inde-
pendent Republicans against other Gaullist candidates on the first ballot
of the legislative elections of March, 1967.12c Bolstered by an impressive
victory in those elections, which raised their Assembly strength from thirty
to forty-four seats at a time when the Gaullist majority as a whole was
being reduced from 284 to 244 seats, the Independent Republicans fended
off all post-election pressures for a merger with the UNR. By the summer of
1967, Giscard d’Estaing was publicly criticizing the government over for-
eign policy, deficit spending, and policy making without “the necessary con-
sultation.”*27
The crisis of May and June, 1968, shook the loyalty of Gaullism’s Right
wing just as it temporarily alienated portions of the Left wing. In the midst
of the crisis, on May 30, 1968, Giscard called for the formation of a new
government, that is to say one without Pompidou. In the legislative elec-
tions of June, 1968, the Independent Republicans ran a separate slate of
candidates on the first ballot, challenging official Gaullist candidates in
fifty-two districts. They expanded their share of Assembly seats from
forty-four to sixty-one in those elections; yet the UDR (campaigning under
the nom de guerre of the Union for the Defense of the Republic) emerged
with 292 out of 487 seats — a strong majority even without the votes of In-
dependent Republican deputies. In early summer of 1968 there were no
signs that Giscard was prepared to abandon the fight for the succession. One
day his followers would be needed again.
Apart from the Giscardiens, who pose the most serious threat to Gaullist
unity, Gaullists of all political stripes gradually are being drawn into a
single party. With Premier Georges Pompidou presiding, an Action Com-
mittee for the Fifth Republic designated an official Gaullist candidate in
each district — not always the Gaullist incumbent — for the legislative
elections of March, 1967. These official candidates — a number of them
from outside the UNR — proceeded to crush all but one of the several
dozen dissident Gaullists who ran against the Committee’s designees, leav-
ing Gaullist deputies with one more reminder of the risks of revolt.,2s Fol-
lowing the elections, the UNR parliamentary group renamed itself the
“Democratic Union for the Fifth Republic” and absorbed most of those
successful Fifth Republic candidates who had been lured away from the
Radicals and the Popular Republicans. In November, 1967, the UNR na-
tional organization followed suit. At a party congress convened at Lille,
unconditional Gaullists of twenty-five years standing shared the platform
with such new converts as Edgar Faure and Maurice Schumann. The new
Union Démocratique pour la Ve République, which emerged out of the