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GV EXT. Place de Valois.
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SV Servan-Schreiber enters and faces press.
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CU Servan-Schreiber speaking.
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Script is copyright Reuters Limited. All rights reserved

Background: The leader of the French centrist Radical Party -- Mr. Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber -- announced in Paris on Tuesday (14 May) that he and he majority of his party would support the conservative candidate M. Valery Giscard D'Estaing against socialist M. Francois Mitterrand in next Sunday's (19 May) presidential elections.

The Radical Party's decision may be crucial to the presidential race which is so close that the floating voters in the centre could away the result.

M. Servan-Schreiber said that he would have liked to have come to an agreement with M. Mitterrand but he could not support the socialist candidate's plans to nationalise a large sector of private industry.

He said that he had made every concession in the hope of persuading M. Mitterrand to delay nationalisation at least until the country's economic problems were cured. But the found he was melt with a blank refusal. Nationalisation he had discovered was the lunch-pin of the Socialist economic policy.

M. Servan-Schreiber said he had watched the presidential campaigning for a month, and had come to the conclusion that M. Giscard D'Estaing would carry out necessary economic reform and should therefore be elected President.