The 2012 French Presidential Elections

The Inevitable Alternation

J. Evans, G. Ivaldi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137011640
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Was the victory of François Hollande, the Socialist challenger to Nicolas Sarkozy, inevitable in the 2012 French Presidential elections? This book argues that a combination of economic downturn, policy choices and personal unpopularity meant that the Right-wing incumbent faced an almost impossible task in holding onto power for another five years.

1

Introduction

The victory of François Hollande on 5 May 2012 in the presidential run-off came as little surprise to observers of French elections. Since the first opinion polls published in June of the previous year, Hollande’s candidacy appeared guaranteed to remove the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, from the Elysée. Throughout the long pre-campaign period, and the campaign itself, the likelihood of Hollande’s victory hardly wavered. Certain events gave Sarkozy a chance to rebuild a reputation at best tarnished, at worst shattered, by a singularly negative quinquennat. The euro crisis and the Toulouse shootings presented an opportunity for the President to act as statesman, in a timely reminder of what a French President is elected to do. But, with the exception of one brief overlap in polling scores during the campaign, Hollande’s consistent trend throughout the entire campaign was towards electoral success.

Of course, ‘obvious’ election outcomes are only confirmed as such once they have occurred. Until the declaration of the second-round result, a potentially surprise result through a Sarkozy victory could have come to characterise the 2012 race. To claim a victory foretold, then, requires a level of consistent evidence pointing to an inevitable result. More prosaically, even for an election seemingly settled in advance as the titular ‘inevitable alternation’, we need to ask precisely which elements of the French political landscape, campaign sequence and voter priorities underpinned Hollande’s success. Beyond the details of electoral victory, how can the Socialist candidate’s victory be interpreted grosso modo? We would suggest three possibilities that existed for characterising 2012 before the election – alternation, stability or protest. By definition, the stability hypothesis can be ruled out – the surprise outcome, featuring a Sarkozy victory, would have been the stable option. Alternation, after the fact, is of course a given. Nevertheless, we examine the extent to which the institutional set-up, party system and campaign led to that outcome.

However, the extent to which protest characterised the presidential and legislative outcomes also needs to be examined carefully. An interpretation of the grounding for Hollande’s victory is important to inform our understanding of the performance of other candidates, in particular the third-, fourth- and fifth-placed Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and François Bayrou. As we shall see, of these, Le Pen and Mélenchon’s performances, garnering over a quarter of the vote, clearly point to a high degree of dissatisfaction with mainstream politics, particularly in the focal point for expressive voting, the first round of the presidential race.

The interplay between alternation and protest also presents the possibility of a more nuanced interpretation of Hollande’s victory. To what extent was the election of the Socialist candidate a de facto vote of confidence in the capacity of the Left to offer a successful alternative to the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) incumbents? And, conversely, to what extent was it a vote of no confidence in the incumbents, to be replaced by the only governing alternative available in a bipolarised system such as France? These are the overarching questions which we endeavour to answer throughout this book.

To coin a phrase, elections of whatever predictability and hue do not take place ‘in a vacuum’. It is a constant of most analyses of national French elections to place the most recent ballot at the end of a seemingly smooth and discernible evolutionary trend in party system dynamics beginning in the early years of the Fifth Republic (Brouard et al., 2009). With a few notable exceptions, the literature analysing this evolution has agreed on the shape and direction of change. In 2012, the new challenge for mainstream parties within the system was to maintain the two-bloc dominance re-established in 2007, and to which the new quinquennat and electoral calendar are conducive. For radical parties and possible splinter candidates within the UMP, it was to disrupt this bipolar dynamic (characteristic of the party system type) and to return to the more polarised and fragmented model of 2002, with a shift in the balance of forces on the extreme left in favour of Mélenchon’s Front de Gauche (FDG) and the electoral revival of the extreme right under Marine Le Pen’s leadership.

The conceptual root of these analyses, drawing implicitly upon the party system framework developed by Sartori (1976), always regards the evolution of the party system in four phases. First, the Fifth Republic imposes an institutional structure which requires a strategic reorientation of the multiple sub-national and notable-oriented party structures of the Fourth Republic. With two national movements pitched against each other, the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) and the Union pour la Nouvelle République (UNR), both of which under the Fourth Republic had acted as anti-system parties (Bartolini, 1984), competitive space was to be found principally amongst fluxes of PCF voters to the moderate-facing Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), and amongst the remaining cadre parties of the Right to de Gaulle’s presidential party.

The second phase witnesses the construction of coherent bloc competition on both the Left and Right in the lead-up to the relatively short-lived but influential singularity of the bipolar quadrille, through the construction of two moderate parties of government flanking the centre. To link the construction of the Union pour la Démocratie Française (UDF) on the centre-right and the nationalisation of the Parti Socialiste (PS) on the centre-left may seem to conflate two very different phenomena in French political history, but in party system terms their effect is very similar. The creation of the PS from the SFIO in 1969 prior to the absorption of François Mitterrand’s Convention des Institutions Républicaines (CIR) at the Epinay Congress of 1971 looked to coalesce what in reality were a series of regionally controlled factions into a single national-level party which could compete across France on an equal footing with the predominant Gaullist party, as well as with its radical PCF neighbour, and thus enable a leftist party to become truly présidentiable. On the Right, there was no issue of an absence of a presidential party, given the presence of the seemingly infinitely renewable and rebrandable UNR. However, since the departure of de Gaulle and the death of his successor Pompidou, continued factionalisation of notables key to the Right’s hold on the Elysée could not be sustained to the left of the Gaullist party, and particularly in supporting the modernising social liberal agenda of Giscard d’Estaing.

The third phase, beginning in the mid-1980s and lasting until 1997, saw a continuation of alternation between the now balanced Left and Right blocs in governmental terms (if not in the presidential equivalent), but precisely through this alternation of weakened governmental executives, either through the deadlock of cohabitation or through minority governments from legislative weakness, there appeared not only strong anti-establishment forces on the extreme right, but also alternatives to the ailing PCF on the extreme left.

The party system which formed the bedrock to the electoral competition of 2012 is directly linked to and a reaction against the end of that third phase. Granted, there have been developments within the system and the party structures since 1997, but the competitive array of the moderate left, the presence of a fragmented set of extreme left parties and the continued ‘pathology’ of an anti-system far right party in the form of the Front National (FN) are constant. The one competitive change of importance which, simultaneously with the constitutional reform of the presidency to last five years rather than seven, can legitimately be said to herald the beginning of a fourth phase was the formation, some 20 years after the Socialist example, of a hegemonically oriented party of the Right, in the shape of the UMP. Yet it is only in the results of 2012, and the relative disappearance of the centre-right force that was the vestiges of the UDF, that this phase attains any clarity. From a consolidation of democratic opponents (Phase 1) to the balancing of Left and Right blocs (Phase 2) through electoral instability by institutional artefact (Phase 3), Phase 4 represents the stabilisation of an essentially bipartisan system with competitive tensions in the centre-right and far right.

In both cases, however, these tensions look to be resolved through a further consolidation of the UMP hegemony. As we will explore throughout this book, the Mouvement Démocrate’s (MODEM) continuation as a relevant force was enabled by its security in endorsing the UMP’s power. As the UMP fell to the Socialists, so the MODEM’s edifice crumbled in challenging for influence on the losing bloc. On the right flank of the UMP, the FN’s once immutable isolation has declined to the extent that the ‘republican front’ strategy – Left and Right versus extreme right in any electoral run-off – has been abandoned, and the FN plus influential hard right wings in the UMP, increasingly at the sub-national level, now talk of collaboration if not coalition.

Of course, more nuanced analyses of party system developments are possible, going beyond a simple four-phase approach (Cole, 2003). But across these, the logic of a consolidation to bipartisme is incontestable. Moreover, the reason for this development is clear. The presidentialisation of the system to ensure that parties act as presidential support groups, at whatever point of the electoral cycle, aiming for a two-candidate run-off, means that, in the long term, those groups must move towards a bipartisan logic. The simplicity of this premise is confounded by sub-national elections, non-rational decisions by candidates acting outside institutional dynamics and other political ‘shocks’, which may, in the short term, multiply candidates or even parties. However, in the long term, other things being equal, the domination of two principal parties in conflict over the presidential position must dominate.

Historically, Charles de Gaulle and the UNR fulfilled this premise early in the Fifth Republic’s lifetime. The anti-system positioning of the PCF meant that it was unable to provide a balanced opposition to draw votes from other left-wing and centrist parties. Paradoxically, the symmetrisation of competition meant that the logic of the septennat and majority government was thwarted by cohabitation – voters felt able to support a government at odds with the presidential position. It is only since the enforced coincidence of the presidential and legislative terms that the role of party as presidential driver has returned.

Overlaying the party system dynamic are of course precisely the confounding factors such as personality effects of minor candidates, regional considerations and political shocks, which render an election to some extent difficult to predict in a deterministic manner.¹ Chapter 2 looks precisely at the knowns and unknowns of this election in terms of the aspects of the election which correspond to the long term in French elections, and those elements which constitute shorter-term confounding factors. To use a horse-racing analogy,² knowing the form of the main candidates, and specifically the two likely front runners, where would the smart money lie? As we shall see from polls of intended vote and popularity, as well as a number of exogenous factors known to influence elections – the state of the economy and involvement in military campaigns, for example – François Hollande emerged favourite. But to extend the analogy just briefly, where would the other candidates place? Or, at least, what would one expect from their performance, even if precision is not possible?

At the electoral level, the ruling UMP had been delivered a number of successive blows by French voters during Sarkozy’s presidency. The UMP had experienced a first notable setback in the 2008 local elections, handing a number of their municipality strongholds – for example Reims, Metz, Caen or Saint-Etienne – to the Left. Following the municipal elections, the latter controlled 29 out of the 40 largest cities with 100,000 inhabitants or more. Simultaneously, in the cantonals, the Left had captured an additional eight departments, totaling 58 out of 102 general councils. Despite a bright spell in the 2009 European elections in which the presidential party and its allies of the NC had taken the lead with 27.9 per cent of the national vote, the UMP faced another severe defeat in the 2010 regional contest, polling a mere 26 per cent in the first round, as opposed to 32.1 per cent for the PS and their allies – with some of the Socialist contenders winning over 60 per cent of the second-round vote – picking up a net total of 21 out of 22 metropolitan regional councils. The 2011 cantonal elections resulted in the highest losses for the mainstream Right since 1958, with the Left taking an additional four departments from the UMP. In September 2011, due in part to the series of electoral setbacks in local ballots since 200...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables, Figures and Maps
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Knowns and Unknowns: Identifying the Critical Spaces of the 2012 Elections
• 3. Party Cooperation and Conflict: Actors’ Competitive Positioning
• 4. Candidate Selection Processes and Effects
• 5. Issues, Policy Debates and Candidate Valence
• 6. Campaign Events
• 7. Polls and VP-Functions: Forecasting the Elections
• 8. The Legislative Elections of June 2012
• 9. Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index