Quick thoughts about the French regional elections

Anarchists tease Leftists. (click to enlarge)

Tonight the polls closed on the first round of the sexennial elections for the 22 regional councils in France.¹ In comparison to the US, the regional councils are sort of like state governments, and their primary dossiers involve education, transportation, and land use. Rue89 has conveniently put together a “Regional Elections for Dummies” page, but, as it’s actually called, “Les régionales pour les nuls,” you can guess that it’s in French, and, hence, not very useful. But it lays down the groundwork.

The way the elections themselves run is a bit peculiar as well: various parties present lists to the voters in the first round, and they vote. If a party (/list) wins an outright majority, there is no second round in that region (from my understanding), and 75% of the seats in the council are distributed via the proportional representation of the rest of the various parties, provided they scored 5%.² Should a party fail to win 50% (as is nearly guaranteed) in the first round, a second round follows.

It’s important to keep in mind this second round while trying to make sense of the performances of the various parties, as well as trying to understand how this first round is being read as a tremendous rebuke to Sarkozy and his policies. But more on that below.

In the second round, only the parties that got at least 10% in the first round can run again. Parties that had at least 5% of the vote, however, are allowed to merge with other parties, to form a united front. Then the winner of a simple plurality gets the bonus seats, and the other 75% are distributed based on performances of the remaining parties.

The temporary winners in Île-de-France. (click to enlarge)

Now some historical background: in 2004, the first time these elections had this 25% bonus seat rule, put in place to defang the ability of the Front National to mess up majorities, The Parti socialiste went to town. They had majorities in 20 of 22 regions in Metroplitan France. But much has happened since. Sarkozy was elected, which helped unify the center-Right under the UMP banner. Furthermore, the center-Left was humiliated at the European Parliament elections, winning only 14 seats (as many as the unified Greens won) to UMP’s 29 seats.

So coming into these elections, the broad, national questions were clear: was the center-Left finished in France? How would the Front National do with a center-Right party at the Élysée? Would the FN’s support be boosted by Éric Besson’s debate on national identity? How would the centrist/liberal faction, represented by the terribly named MoDem, fare between the UMP and PS juggernauts? And, for my own interest, how would the far Left parties, split into basically two factions, the Front de Gauche, made up of the PCF and other parties, which was willing to join executives headed by the PS, and the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste, which was nationally mute on the topic, but argued locally against collaborating with the center-Leftists.

So, first, the Sarkozyan failure and the explosion of the PS. Libération put together a slightly buggy little web application that shows a map of France and shows the various results. If one looks at it right now, one sees:

First round results. (click to enlarge)

As one can see from the Île-de-France (greater Paris) results, the color scheme is not what Americans might expect. Pink is the socialists, and blue is the UMP. In any case, for a party that got just 16% of the vote last year during the EU elections, it certainly has its distinctive pink color splashed around a whole bunch of this map. But considering how little of the map was blue in 2004, how can this be considered a huge night for the Left and a slam of Sarkozy?

Pierre Haski at Rue89 spells out three specific FAILs of the Sarkozyan régime:

1. The UMP rallied the “Presidential majority” in round 1, and failed to win 50% anywhere. Where, exactly, their extra votes are coming from is totally unclear. Look at a case like Île-de-France in the picture above. Infamous Valérie Précresse won almost 28% of the vote, but who will jump aboard to push her list over 50%? The E-É Green faction will almost certainly fuse with the PS (their national numbers are down a bit from last year’s triumph, which saw them match the PS’s performance). The FN will likely not crossover. And MoDem is effectively finished as a political movement, possibly to be embraced by the Ségolène Royal wing of the PS.³
2. The UMP’s transparent play for far-right votes by launching the debate on national identity failed to neutralize the FN, which only had its numbers suppressed a bit. By clearing 10% in 12 regions, the FN will find itself with seats in 12 regional councils.
3. Sarkozy’s brash egomania has been soundly rejected by a PS in ascendence.

Parisians are not fans of the FN. (click to enlarge)

The FN’s performance I find rather fascinating. Many people tweeting about the elections continually expressed their shame at the performance of the party (see here, here, and here), but it remains a force: Jean-Marie Le Pen, running in PACA (far southeastern France), cleared over 20% of the vote. His daughter Marine, running in the traditional left-wing stronghold of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, cleared 18%. It’s only in western France and Île-de-France where the FN failed to reach 10%.

All the same, the FN’s 11.7% performance at the national level suggests a possible new third party in France, and it’s Europe-Écologie. Their leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (an MEP) was all over the television this evening, sticking it to the UMP representatives–some of whom went so far as to point out that the UMP might be able to fuse with the E-É list in order to bring a coalition over 50%. Île-de-France’s E-É candidate, Cécile Duflot, however, explained that it’ll be green-pink coalitions that are made, not green-blue. And though the E-É performance of 12.5% off their pace from last year, by topping the FN, the Green faction has established itself as the main third force in French politics.

The less said about MoDem, the better. It seems fitting that the best MoDem story of the night I’ve relegated to a footnote.

Olivier Besancenot and the NPA. (click to enlarge)

But now we get to the juicy, stuff, the tussle of the far Left parties. I don’t fully appreciate the distinctions, nor do I know all the back stories, of the myriad far Left parties. I know that with them I share a skeptical view of the PS (exemplified by Besson, a PS defector who worked overtime to burnish his new right-wing credentials, and by Royal, always willing, like a New Democrat, to look for allies on the Right instead of on the Left). But I also, like them, hate the Sarkozyist France more than the PS vision.

Simply put, while the Front de Gauche did well enough to merge with the PS lists in some regions, including Île-de-France, the NPA was humiliated. I have no idea what Olivier Besancenot, the head of the Île-de-France list, expected from the party (he is not their head, as the NPA has no head), but a 2.5% national performance is not a good sign for the future. Emerging out of the far Left success in the presidential elections, the NPA surely had higher hopes, but now they will seat not a single person in any region, except in places like Limousin, where they united with the FG. In fact, in Limousin, the 13% performance means that they stand a chance to seat a person without having to (further) compromise with the PS.

Additionally, Besancenot was totally absent from the television today (at least while I was watching, but I remembered rather late that I could watch TV on my telephone), and, if anything, hurt his image when he did show, allegedly wearing a pair of Nikes. That is probably not the best fashion sense for an anti-capitalist allegedly concerned about globalization. All the same, the NPA came out with a call for a strike on March 23 (just after the second round), calling it a third round of action. The document put out by the NPA after the election, however, further fascinated me.

In this document, the NPA complained that the resounding anti-UMP sentiment of the electorate allowed the PS to escape culpability for its own failures over the past six years of regional control. Furthermore, the executive council asserts, the racist politics of the UMP have only served to keep the FN on the playing field. All the same, the party exhorts its members to make certain that the door is closed to Sarkozyism in the second round. “We’ll deal with the weak Left later,” they seem to say.

Non-voters win! (liberation.fr) (click to enlarge)

But there is one more point made by the NPA that was variously remarked upon by many tonight: the outrageous level of abstention (as they say in France) of 53%. Or, as we’d say in the US, the awful turnout of 47%. The NPA sees in that mass of silence much of its future support (and I’m inclined to agree), but that tremendous number has been finessed in many different ways beyond as a mark of shame. For the Left in general, it was seen as an explanation for the strength of the FN. As in the US, it’s the extremely motivated (read: fringe) who tend to vote in smaller elections. So turnout is higher among the FN than among, say, the PS. For the Right, including Frédéric Lefebvre, the low turnout was proof of dissatisfaction with the PS. This point, which Lefebvre repeatedly made on television, was then twisted as showing how a rejection of the UMP in the polls was actually to their benefit.

I don’t know what the standard turnout for this sort of election is, but talking about the rate was the big topic all night, as mentioned. It’s a shame for parties like the NPA and FG (I do believe that their support comes from people most likely not to vote, even if they are fringe actors), but that’s how things are.

So what will come next Sunday? It’s hard to see how the PS doesn’t, again, practically run the table. Alsace and Corsica will probably stay UMP, as they have substantial majorities over the PS, although the strong performance of the E-É in Alsace might even make that region turn pink-green. Wherever else the UMP has chiseled out a lead after the first round, the PS is nipping at its heels. The opposite is, of course, often true, but the UMP has more or less maxed out its appeal, as noted above.

What, then, that all means is totally unclear, since it’s not like France is a Leftist paradise at this current time. Alas.

1. There are 25 total, including the départements d’outre-mer. Those three also had elections today. [↩]
2. Incidentally, the candidate party lists must have a 50/50 gender split. Also interesting is how this system, unlike anything in the US, that I know of, relies on a tiered list. So if the party in question wins just one seat, it’s the top person who gets the seat. If they win two, they include the next person down, and so on. It’s an amazing hierarchy built into the system. [↩]
3. One of tonight’s touching bits of television theater was during the loser speech of MoDem head François Bayrou. A microphone began to feedback, and he sarcastically thanked it, suggesting that dude just couldn’t get a break tonight. [↩]

Tags: Cécile Duflot, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Éric Besson, Europe-Écologie, France, François Bayrou, Frédéric Lefebvre, Front de Gauche, Front National, identity, Libération, MoDem, nationalism, Nicolas Sarkozy, Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, Olivier Besancenot, Paris, Parti Socialiste, PCF, Pierre Haski, Rue89, Ségolène Royal, UMP, Valérie Pécresse