Faced in the second round with the choice between a Communist and a Gaullist, he proposed that voters choose the Communist. This was a bombshell. Since the breakup of the Resistance tripartite coalition in 1947, the Communists and Socialists had been bitter enemies. One of the reasons Mollet rallied to de Gaulle in 1958 was that the alternative might have been a government of the left that included Communists. Mollet’s comment in 1962 brought the Communists back into the fold of respectable politics, embarrassing the centrists and conservatives in the No Cartel.
