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Political Representation in France: a Crisis of Democracy?

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Political Representation in France: a Crisis of Democracy? Parliamentary Affairs Vol. 59 No. 1, 2006, 118–137 Advance Access Publication 22 November 2005 Political Representation in France: A Crisis of Democracy? Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/article-abstract/59/1/118/1588097 by UWE Bristol user on 12 January 2019 BY J. G. SHIELDS1 ON the morning of 21 April 2002, voting in the first round of the French presidential election got underway. The election marked the end of a 5-year period of ‘cohabitation’, or power-sharing, between the neo-Gaullist President Jacques Chirac and a ‘plural left’ government under Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. Despite a record slate of 16 candidates, all six main polling agencies had consistently predicted that, as in 1995, these two main contenders would face each other in the decisive round on 5 May. They were wrong.2 Winning 16.9% of the ballot, the support of 4.8 million voters, the leader of the Front National (FN), Jean-Marie Le Pen, edged Jospin out of the race to ensure that a far-right candidate would for the first time contest the run-off for France’s highest political office. The questions raised by this result about the state of representative democracy in France were made no less acute by the overwhelming margin of victory in the second round, where Chirac, backed by the ‘plural left’ as well as the centre-right, trounced Le Pen with 82.2% to 17.8%. That France should have voted massively, in the popular parlance, for a ‘crook’ in order to keep out a ‘fascist’ hardly reflected well on the French polity. Yet Le Pen’s passage to the second round was only one symptom among several of the political malaise laid bare by the 2002 presidential election, and that election was but one in a series of polls which have been marked by varying degrees of volatility and signs of a widening gulf between electors and elites in France. The present article explores this political malaise, which found its most recent expression in the European Union (EU) constitutional treaty referendum of May 2005, and seeks to identify some of the reasons underlying it. It examines aspects of French public opinion in relation to the functioning of demo- cracy and considers how disaffection with the mainstream parties has served as a stimulus to negative politicisation and modified the condi- tions of electoral competition in France. Volatile voters Electoral volatility in France does not date from 2002. Every legislative election in the past 25 years has seen the governing majority overturned. To judge by the swing in the last three of these elections, moreover, the Parliamentary Affairs Vol. 59 No. 1 © The Author [2005]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] doi: 10.1093/pa/gsj013 Political Representation in France 119 momentum of rejection against incumbent governments has grown appreciably. The elections of 1986 and 1988 produced narrow majori- ties and largely preserved the right/left equilibrium that had hitherto characterised the French party system under the Fifth Republic, with four dominant parties facing off in opposing coalitions. The classic Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/article-abstract/59/1/118/1588097 by UWE Bristol user on 12 January 2019 illustration of this ‘quadrille bipolaire’ had occurred in 1978, when the Socialist PS, the Communist PCF, the neo-Gaullist RPR, and smaller centre-right parties within and around the UDF,3 each recording a score of 20%–25%, had accounted for some 90% of the vote. Despite the emergence of the FN as an isolated force on the far right and the decline of the PCF, the power balance between the opposing blocs was broadly maintained in the 1980s, with an ascendant PS compensating for its weaker Communist partner within the left bloc and the RPR–UDF prompted into more disciplined alliance by the FN. Since then, the electoral landscape has undergone a series of more dramatic shifts. Closing the second 5-year period of Socialist govern- ment under President François Mitterrand, the elections of 1993 saw the Socialist/Communist tandem and their smaller allies fall from almost 49% (in 1988) to just over 29%, with the PS alone collapsing from 34.9% to 17.8%, a loss of some 4 million votes.4 This was the worst first-round result for the left in legislative elections since the foun- dation of the Fifth Republic in 1958, giving the centre-right 485 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly. That sweeping victory was followed, after 4 years in government, by the weakest performance on record for the RPR–UDF alliance, which sustained a loss of 216 seats. Winning 190 of these, the PS returned to government in 1997 at the head of a coalition including Communists, Greens and others. In the subsequent legislative elections of 2002, the centre-right was returned with an emphatic majority once more. The novel aspect of these elections was the launch, in the wake of Chirac’s re-election as President, of a large centre-right party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), incorporating the RPR, much of the UDF and its offshoot Démocratie Libérale (DL). For only the third time under the Fifth Republic, a single party (the UMP, with 369 seats) secured an outright majority in the National Assembly. This compounded the humiliation for the Socialists of having seen their candidate ousted by Le Pen in the presidential elec- tion, and left the centre-right in control of the Elysée, National Assem- bly, Senate, Constitutional Council and most regional and departmental councils throughout France. This brief overview of the fluctuating fortunes of the main parties of right and left in recent legislative elections forms part of a wider picture of electoral shifts and fragmentation. Though some of the same factors that dictated the bipolarisation of the 1960s and 1970s remain in place, others have been substantially transformed.5 Changes in social structures, the long-term decline of the PCF, the sustained challenge of the FN, the progressive rapprochement of centre-right and centre-left, and the growth 120 Parliamentary Affairs in issue-specific voting have all conspired to disrupt the old right/left polarisation and redefine political alignments. The apparent stability restored to French politics in 2002 by the hegemony of the UMP did not last long. The regional elections of March 2004 saw the left sweep all but two of metropolitan France’s 22 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/pa/article-abstract/59/1/118/1588097 by UWE Bristol user on 12 January 2019 regional councils. This almost entire collapse of the centre-right replayed in reverse the rout of the left in 1992, when the RPR–UDF had won 20 of the 22 metropolitan regions. In three consecutive regional elections, the balance of power had swung from one extreme to the other, with a right/left split of 20/2 in 1992, 14/8 in 1998 and 2/20 in 2004. A more historic landmark was passed in the cantonal elections held at the same time to elect councillors to the 100 departmental councils in metropolitan and overseas France. The swing here saw the balance of power shift to the left for the first time since the creation of the depart- ments in 1790, with 51 left-wing to 49 centre-right councils (compared with the previous ratio of 41/59). Though subnational and supranational elections require cautious interpretation in relation to national voting trends, the European elec- tions of June 2004 and the EU constitutional treaty referendum of May 2005 fitted this same shifting pattern. In the European elections, the PS won 31 of the 78 French seats in the European Parliament, against the governing UMP’s 17 and the UDF’s 11; in language that has become common currency for French political commentators, this was pro- claimed a ‘crushing’ and ‘historic’ victory (Le Monde, 15.6.04). The sub- sequent decision by President Chirac to put the proposed EU constitution to referendum was prompted in part by a resolution of the UMP national council, but it was based above all on the calculation that the French would vote ‘yes’. Though the Maastricht referendum of 1992 had resulted in a narrow ‘yes’ vote (51%), there were no early signs that a referendum on the constitution would produce anything other than a clear majority in support. With polls as late as March 2005 predicting a 56%/44% vote in favour (Le Monde, 27.5.05), the eventual rejection of the constitution by a similarly wide margin (55%/45%) had its own per- verse irony and raised a host of questions over both France and Europe. Disaffected voters This sequence of votes against successive governments and their projects points to a disjuncture between electoral demand and political supply. Alternating right/left governments do not in themselves signify electoral instability, of course, and might be taken as evidence of a healthy pluralist democracy. Nor do such alternations necessarily signal an inordinate degree of volatility, since they can result as much from bloc demobilisation (voters simply not turning out) as from bloc switching (voters actively transferring their support). While there is evidence of both trends in recent French electoral behaviour,6 the sanction inflicted on incumbent governments over six elections—following six elections Political Representation in France 121 that had consistently returned centre-right majorities—appears not as a ‘normal’ electoral rhythm but, allied to other factors, as an exacerbated expression of political disaffection. Such disaffection has been long in the making.
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