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The French general election of 16 March 1986
ElectoraiStudies(1986). S:3.219-252
The French General Election of 16 March 1986 D
Lincoln College, Oxjord OX1 3DR, England R. W. JOHNSOS Mugdalen College, Oxford OX1 4AlJ, England
The French general election of 1986 is revealing on five counts. First it suggests that a change of electoral system has more effect on the allocation of seats than on voting behaviour-at least for the first election after the change. (That provides comfort for those academic specialists who discount the influence of electoral on party systems-and explains why professional politicians pay them no heed.) Second, it was the first French election since 1945 to combine two contests (regional and parliamentary) on the same day (on the regionals, see Sonia Mazey, ‘The Regional Elections’, pp. 297-301). Unlike the 1945 result (or the United States) there was little ticket splitting; national issues and patterns dominated both elections, confirming the nationalization of French politics. The third lesson of the parliamentary contest was to confirm the general evolution of electoral politics in the Fifth Republic towards the norm for most major western democracies: nationalization and homogenization of support for the major parties. as the old solid bastions of region, religion and class are eroded (but not demolished); the precipitous decline of Communist parties, a particular example of the generally reduced capacity of working class organizations and parties to mobilize their traditional supporters; a decline in turnout and the increasing importance of differential turnout; and the eruption of noneconomic issues in a period of economic difficulty-law and order, an anti-permissive backlash, race and immigration. However, (fourth) in France these issues have been most sucessfully exploited by a new (flash?) party of the extreme right, the National Front (FN), partly thanks to the introduction of proportional representation. The FN’s unexpected emergence over the past two years marks France from its neighbours-for the moment, at least. In 1986, the FN had a greater impact on the distribution of seats within the right, and thus on the situation of the new conservative government and of the new regional executives, than on the distribution of the vote between right and left. Its success in helping to deprive the respectable right-the Rally for the Republic (RPR) and the Union for French Democracy (UDF)-of an extensive parliamentary majority largely explains why President Mitterrand finally changed the electoral system to proportional representation (PR) for the 1986 election and why Prime IMinister Jacques Chirac has already changed it back again to the single member two-ballot majority system. Dr Goidey wishes to thank the Lincoln College Research Fund and the Oxford Board of the Faculty of Social Studies for helping him to go to France to study the elections. l
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The French General Election yi 16 March 19X6
Finally, the success of the FN at both national and regional level has added to and intensifed the internal tensions and rivalries within the right. while the decline of the Communists (PCF) and the amplification of Socialist party (PS) dominance of the left, have reduced conflict within that part of the political spectrum. These are not just academic considerations: a presidential election is due in the spring of 1988 and may come earlier; the 1986 general election was a dry run for that contest. traditionally the dominant one in the politics of the Fifth Republic. 1986 has confirmed the preponderance of the RPR on the right and the pre-eminence of the PS on the left. It may help move France from the bipolar four-party system of 1972-81 (and its present bipolar three major and two minor party distribution) towards something closer to a two party system with the extreme minor parties retaining only nuisance value.
From
1781 to 1986
The 1981 presidential and parliamentary elections which brought the left to power for the first time in a generation were somewhat prematurely hailed as a critical or realigning election. They were also greeted as a conversion of the French electorate to the most radical democratic socialist programme of any major west European country. A more prudent look at the results, however, confirmed neither hypothesis. Rather, a divided right n-as rejected after almost a quarter of a century in power; a discredited PCF punished for breaking the union of the left; and the victory of the PS achieved with the standard promises of sustained growth. reduced unemployment, and increased social benefits. These promises were to be fulfilled through the ‘other logic’ of planning, nationalization, state subsidies and investment to revive old industries. promote new ones and create jobs; and by improved social benefits and an increased minimum wage to stimulate consumption. The Socialist platform. however, owed more to the exigencies of the past alliance with the Communist party, the continuing need to capture its electorate, and to the internal balance within the PS itself. than to any very convincing economic analysis of the relation between the means and ends of the programme. l Mitterrand had won the 1981 elections thanks to the self-defeating tactics of the PCF which with the internecine conflicts within the right and the bickering between President Giscard d’Estaing and his former Prime Minister. Jacques Chirac, enabled him to gain pivotal centrist votes as well. These middle class, often Catholic voters were not particularly attracted by the redistributive planks in the PS platform, and their support rapidly ebbed away in the first two years of Socialist rule, as Mitterrand kept his redistributive promises and gave priority to anchoring into the PS the working class vote recently acquired from the PCF. As the ‘other logic’ proved incapable of sustaining, much less expanding. coal and steel production. French expansion sucked in imports. threatening the balance of payments and currency stability. Despite two devaluations in 1981 and 1982, the 1982 attempt to limit inflation and the budget deficit weakened employment more than it strengthened the franc. Disillusion spread from the liberal professions and business men to white and blue collar workers. A programme of reflationary growth was always likely-especially in the context of the international deflation of the early 1980s-to run hard into balance of payments constraints and currency depreciation. In March 1983, Mitterrand had to decide how to share out austerity. He chose further devaluation, and rising unemployment within the existing international economic framework, rather than continuing redistributive policies in a siege economy. For ignoring those in the Finance Ministry and the PM’s office who had urged he
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make the former choice from the spring of 198 1, he guaranteed that the adjustment of 1983 was all the harsher. Unemployment was further intensified by the belated decision to withdraw resources from the declining smokestack industries and concentrate them in the new sunrise sectors. As taxes and unemployment rose, the government’s popularity plummeted to an all time low, with too little time for the anticipated pre-election boomlet to work its magic’ (as may be seen from Table 1).
The Rise of the FN and Decline
of the PCF
The President’s acute unpopularity from the summer of 1983 to 1985, and the public’s sense of disillusion, drift and abandon, powerfully contributed to the popular fixation with law and order and immigration, and so to the rapid rise from nowhere of the FN, which battened on these issues and their careless exploitation by the RPR, and also served to express the right’s exasperation and frustration. The government’s record unpopularity thus did not help the RPR-UDF as much as they anticipated. Their own undistinguished record in office was too recent, their internal rivalries too evident. Instead, the FIN profited. Hard times, however, also improved the standing of former Prime Minister Raymond Barre, who had made something of a specialty of announcing unpleasant home truths. Sure of himself, disdainful of ex-President Giscard d’Estaing and his own predecessor at Matignon, Jacques Chirac, Barre was the most troublesome figure in the conservative camp and Mitterrand’s most dangerous potential challenger, although without a real party of his own.3 Mitterrand’s strategy from 1983 was to concentrate the necessary sacrifices into 18 months or two years, to give himself some leeway for the 1986 election. The institutions of the Fifth Republic gave him the security for such a strategy: the divisions of the opposition and the weakness of the PCF gave him some room for manceuvre. The PCF’s veiled criticisms of the government from within (and its departure from government in July 1984) could not prevent the party sharing in the general unpopularity of the left, so glaring were its own mistakes. Its apparently ineluctable decline allowed Mitterrand to hope to recoup some of the support lost since 198 1. Heir to the largest part of the PCF electorate. the PS might also hope to appeal again for centrist votes, for the weakness of the Communists precluded them from effectively attacking the PS from the left. TABLE 1. Disposable household 1985’
income/GDP:
Year
% change disposable income
1981
+ 2.8
1982 1983 1984 1985
+ 2.6 -0.7 -0.7 +1.0
1981-
% change GDP + + + + +
0.6 2.0 0.7 1.3 1.3
Adapted from ‘1981-1986: Bilan de la France’, L.e 1986. But from May 1981 to January 1986, the buying power of the minimum wage rose by 12.2%, and of the minimum old age pension by 25.2%. That of foremen, managerial staff, the liberal professions and the middle class (retired) fell, from 0.4% to 2.7% per year. l
Point, 17 February
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The French
General Election oj 16 March
1986
Since neither PCF impotence nor labour peace could be assured in 1983 if the PCF left the government then. Mitterrand had to delay the effective appeal to the centre implied by his austerity policy. Instead. he maintained Pierre Mauroy as premier. thoroughly discredited everywhere except within the PS and PCF. Meanwhile, the general sense of malaise and drift emboldened not only the FN but all those with a grievance against government policy to resort to direct action: truckers, farmers. medical students and the professions. and finally the church school lobby. blauroy’s clumsy attempts to distract PS militants from the government’s broken economic promises with action against reactionary press baron Robert Hersant and subsidies for church schools. ultimately backfired. at the premier’s own expense. The nadir was reached with the June 1984 European election, fought in France by national lists: the PS lost almost half its 198 1 vote, the PCF fell back from 16 per cent to 11 per cent, while the FN came from nowhere also to 11 per cent, enough to keep the joint RPR-UDF list from winning a majority of the vote.” Mitterrand could now safely dispense with the PCF, and it was anxious for an excuse to leave government. The policy crisis over church schools was further undermining the government, mobilizing huge demonstrations against it and separating the PS from the centrist support it would need in 1986. On 12 July 1984, Mitterrand simply withdrew his schools bill. Mauroy resigned, and the President, free of the PCF incubus, appointed his loyal follower (and faithful hatchet man within the PS), Laurent Fabius, as Premier. As Minister of Industry from 1983, Fabius had been responsible for restructuring the nationalized sector-and thus for the decline of the old industries in which PCF strength had traditionally been concentrated. The party had refused to vote confidence in his industrial policy in April: in July. it was offered reduced representation in his government. But even the rump Communist electorate remained attached to the union of the left. The PCF thus simply declined to enter the new government in July: by September it claimed no longer to be part of the left majority but not yet in opposition to the PS; by the 25th party congress of February 1985, it was attacking the government more vigorously than the right-repeating its suicidal policy of 1978-8 1.
The Change
to PR
Having disposed of the schools issue, Mauroy, and the PCF. Mitterrand nas non- in a position to match his appeal to his policy. Prime IMinister Fabius set out to lower the political temperature by a systematic campaign of &crLrpation, and to steal the right’s advantage. The language of priorities ceased to be socialist and became consensual and technocratic: Fabius emphasized the productivity, competitiveness and profitability of the firm. and above all, modernization. Mitterrand had toyed. as had Giscard unsuccessfully before him. mith reviving a centre group that might rally its support for the benefit of the government. A change in the electoral system to PR was a necessary condition for the success of such a strategy; in the circumstances it was not a sufficient one as the failure of Socialist-inspired centrist lists in the European election had demonstrated. With 20 per cent of the vote itself, and a diminished PCF, the PS faced a defeat in 1986 as sweeping as its own victory in 1981. The old constituency boundaries of the single-member seats, largely unchanged since 1958, were unfavourable to the left; but on the basis of the 1984 result, no rejigging of these boundaries, no matter how skilfully gerrymandered, would prevent the RPR-UDF winning a substantial majority of seats-and forcing out President Mitterrand. PS party leaders and ministers saw PR as a certain way to return to parliament. since under a PR list system, the party would control the order of candidates on
D,ALID B. GOLDEY mo
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the d@zrtemental lists. The same calculation made PR less attractive to the party’s minorities, and both CERES and the Rocardians opposed the change. They were joined by some powerful PS federations-like Pas-de-Calais-where the preponderance of the PS over the PCF enabled the former to win seats at the expense of the latter on the second ballot. With PR, the PCF would rescue its seats at the expense of the PS. The opposite, however, held true in the old red belt around Paris. Here the two-ballot system had allowed a still dominant PCF to profit from the rising PS vote on the run-o& PR in Seine-St-Denis and VaI de Mame would allow PS deputies to be returned at the expense of the PCF in the party’s historic heartland. But Mitterrand, never himself a partisan of PR (although it figured in his 1981 presidential platform), preferred a two-ballot system that squeezed the PCF and forced it to back a PS presidential candidate in exchange for PS votes to rescue the diminishing band of Communist deputies. The final decision was thus put off until closer to the election-a characteristic of previous changes of French electoral systems. The dkpartemental council (cantonal) elections of March 1985, confirmed the 1984 results, and forced a decision. The PCF seemed incapable of restoring its fortunes, while the FN sustained its impetus. The election showed that an enfeebled PCF hostile to the PS was less help to the PS on the second ballot, than a rising FN was likely to be to the right. Its newly mobilized voters generally rallied to RPR or UDF candidates on the run-off, even where the FN tried to stay in the race.> The two-ballot majority system was thus doomed, but the government was still tempted by a two-ballot proportional representation system, as used in the 1983 municipal elections, to keep the PCF in thrall to the PS. But the opprobrium risked by inventing a complicated PR system used in no other country outweighed the putative advantage to be gained from electoral engineering. The government thus finally opted for the basic electoral system of the Fourth Republic: the highest average (d’Hondt) list system with the dbpartemetzt as constituency. Deputies were not, however, allocated to d@zrtements strictly proportionately, partly in order to preserve a minimum of 2 deputies for the smallest dipartements; partly in order not to increase the size of the National Assembly too much; partly to discriminate against the opposition. Looking to find a ratio of population to deputy that would not reduce a dbpartement ‘s representation, the Ministry of the Interior discovered that at 108.000 per deputy only the city of Paris (with a declining population), Chirac’s fief, lost membersfrom 31 to 21.6 The new system had two other casualties. One was Giscard, whose book, Deu.r Franc&r sur Trois, calling for a return to PR, appeared shortly before the government gratified his wishes; he responded by denouncing the change he had so recently advocated. The other was Michel Rocard, Mitterrand’s unforgiven challenger for the PS presidential nomination in 1981, and the PS leader persistently most popular with the centrist floating vote. His followers in the PS risked being squeezed by central office in the allocation of winnable places on PS lists, while his own popularity was suffering from the competing appeal of Fabius. To preserve his own presidential prospects, he resigned from a government where he stood little chance of preferment in any case. His presidential strategy, however, was now too clearly predicated on the PS doing so badly in the coming general election, that he would be its only plausible saviour. Rocard’s departure did not, however, restore unanimity to the PS. Until his resignation, he was the chief threat to the ambitions of the Mitterrandist leadership of the PS. With Rocard gone, rivalries within the Mitterrandist ranks promptly resurfaced, as the smooth, ambitious and arrogantjeune premier, Laurent Fabius, monopolized centre stage. At stake in the first instance was the control of the campaign, with the succession to Mitterrand not
234
The French General Eleclion oj I6
hhch
1986
far in the background. Mitterrand. also apparently increasingly irritated by the pretensions of his dauphin, ambiguously decided the quarrel over the direction of the campaign in party secretary Lionel Jospin’s favour: he was left in charge of the party’s campaign, with Fabius free to try to appeal to centrist voters.
The Construction
of Party
Lists
After almost 30 years of the single member majority system, all parties found the construction of dipartemental lists a difficult operation, caught between the priorities of the centre, the power of local notables. and their own internal conflicts. PS headquarters set out to widen the party’s appeal-and reduce the possibility of small lists taking precious votes from it-by forcing dipartemental federations to accept interlopers at the top of their lists. For party headquarters, local considerations counted less than finding a safe berth for party leaders and ministers; balancing candidatures to reflect the weight of tendencies within the party (and the preponderance of the hlitterrandists in it); providing places for occasional Left Radical (MRG) allies, a centrist renegade, a PSU leader or a leading ex-Communist; or even in providing a few winnable positions for women. These worthy ends were pursued to the advantage of ministers and Mitterrandists and at the expense of the Rocardians, provoking dissident lists (Rocardian) in the west and against MRG-led lists in the south-west, although compensation was offered disappointed notables (as in other parties) on the regional lists. Party central offices ignored long records of faithful local service at their peril: no party quite resolved the dilemma. The PCF faced the same sort of problem, though for different reasons. Its animus against the PS alienated not only part of its electorate. but also full-time party organizers (permanents) and former ministers. Dissident federations were generally brought to heel and orthodox candidates imposed, as in Seine-St-Denis. at the price of kicking popular local figures upstairs on to the regional lists, or barring their candidacies altogether. It was striking how many dbpartemental lists were headed by little known permanents while local PCF notables confined to regional lists were to embarrass the party by running ahead of sectarian loyalists heading the legislative lists. The FN, on the other hand, used its newly established central control to welcome-in local notables who might bring some support with them, displacing as candidates loyal but rebarbative militants. The ancient and accomplished conservative opportunist, Edouard Frederic-DuPont thus took second place on the FN’s Paris list. behind its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The FN thus sacrificed loyalty to electoral appeal in its search for candidates, risking later indiscipline: the PCF made the opposite choice, courting further electoral decline. On the respectable right, pressure from business contributors, determined to see the Socialists out, and the clear unitary disposition of the conservative electorate. helped dissuade Raymond Barre from mounting his own lists except in isolated instances and helped constrain Chirac to agree to more joint RPR-UDF lists than he would have liked. Chirac had intended to displace local notables at the end of their useful careers or members not entirely loyal to him, and to run separate RPR lists wherever he could, to provide himself with a large, renovated and totally disciplined party to make him Prime Minister and then President. Instead, the threat that Barre-or the FN-might profit from the disappointment of well entrenched local men tied both the RPR and UDF to their sitting members and local worthies; their lists thus came to ‘resemble a Restoration, the court of Louis XVIII, replete with old powdered marquis. their wigs whitened with the passage of time, and with great local feudatories’, as Le Point acidly remarked. Chirac thus found he had competing priorities, and sacrificed his dream of a renewed party
D.AVID B. GOLDEY AXD
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to his presidential ambitions, and the need to hobble his competitors. Together with G&card and his henchmen in the Republican Party, the largest, best organized component of the UDF, Chirac aimed to keep declared Barristes from winnable places on conservative lists wherever possible. However. well before the election, Chirac also sought to undermine Giscard’s uncertain hold over the Republicans (and within the UDF) by wooing the rising generation within Giscard’s own party. Chirac made a particular effort with the party’s general secretary, Francois Leotard, and its ideologues, Alain Madelin and Gerard Longuet, all three of whom had distinguished themselves by their unrestrained opposition to the PS and the President and by espousing an unrefined Reaganism. Chirac sought to help these young Turks consolidate their influence in the Republican Party at the expense of Giscard and Barre, as he had previously tried with the other components of the UDF, to colonize the Radicals, and (with less success) to court the Barriste Centre Democrats (CDS). The threat from the FN and the aim of squeezing Barre led Chirac to abandon his initial plan of dividing the right, counting on the record unpopularity of the PS to attenuate the bias of the highest average rule in favour of the big batallions. Separate RPR lists risked pushing the UDF further towards Barre and destroying Chirac’s carefully cultivated influence within the UDF and over its nominations. Separate RPR lists were also the more vulnerable to FN competition. The risks appeared greatest in the three-fifths of the d@rtements with five seats or less, where the electoral system was least proportional, the penalties for division greatest, and the desire of local conservative notables for unity the strongest. Separate RPR lists were also opposed by old Gaullist barons and regional bosses, like Olivier Guichard in the west and Jacques Chaban-Delmas in Aquitaine; they had no intention of sacrificing their local hegemony to Chirac’s presidential ambitions-particularly since they might later wish to rally to Barre. Finally, the pressure for joint lists won out in two-thirds of the dipartements (with some third of the seats). Joint RPR-UDF lists meant negotiations between competing allies, however. but the UDF was a loose confederation. not a unified party like the RPR. Jacques Toubon. Chirac’s loyal henchman at the head of the RPR, was tempted to require the UDF to resolve its internal conflicts itself; but that would risk the RPR losing its influence over the intra-UDF distribution of power to Barre and Giscard. Toubon therefore agreed to negotiate with the different components of the UDF: the ostensibly Giscardian Republicans, the Barriste CDS and the Radicals, characteristically divided but as beholden to Chirac as to any UDF leader. The negotiations successfully restricted the number of Barristes in winning positionsthough not without provoking a dissident list in Yvelines-but it also encouraged UDF leaders to resolve their internal rivalries at the expense of the RPR. The price Toubon paid for keeping Barristes out was the surrender of more places and better positions to UDF candidates on the joint lists than he had planned. Finally, the negotiations gave an opportunity to Robert Hersant, proprietor of Le Figaro, Le ProgrLr (Lyon) and a great chain of regional dailies to extract nominations for himself and his creatures-sometimes by backing a separate list, as with the UDF in Pas-de-Calais. All conservative leaders wanted Hersant’s support, locally and nationally. He wanted repeal of the recent Socialist legislation against press monopolies, and one-or more-of the state television channels that the right was promising to denationalize. Hersant also had the wherewithal to fund lists with his candidates. Joint RPR-UDF lists had the enthusiastic support of local and national business. Otherwise, local contributors put their money on the sitting member and his team; nationally, the big money was overwhelmingly on the RPR. Nor did the PS want for funds. In the dipartements, parties spent twice as much on their lists as their candidates together had spent in their individual constituencies in 198 1. The campaign was as expensive as it was uninteresting.
236
The French
Gene&
Election
OJ’ IO Alarch
IW(
The Campaign The government had prepared a modest election budget for 1985186. to inject a little disposable income without again undermining the franc (whose devaluation after the election was widely expected as in 1981). This balancing act was greatly assisted by the autumn decline in both the price of oil and the dollar. whose high rates in 198 1-84 had done so much to throw the government’s initial expansionary policy off course. These windfalls certainly helped the return of confidence. which in turn helped the government. Conscious that its own unpopularity was greater than any confidence in its opponents, the PS planned a campaign that would first remind the d&us de sociulisme of the unpalatability of the alternative; then play on the fundamental left/right cleavage, which was much more favourable to the left than the PSIRPR-UDF division. and which had the further advantage of attracting PCF voters to the PS while further marginalizing their party: and finally, remind voters of the popular achievements of the government, harking back to /a force tranquille of 1981, the legitimacy of the President. and the disinclination to suffer a constitutional crisis. The PS launched the first phase of its campaign in November 1985: switched to second gear in early January: and to third in early February. The opposition’s themes were perhaps less well-chosen. partly because the PS had taken over some of its best ground since 1984, and the Communists were no longer a plausible menace: but also because the right was divided, competing with itself in the large urban dipartements and torn by the conflicting presidential ambitions of its leaders. RPR posters featured Chirac, with the RPR national team or its local candidates, but all in shirt-sleeves. confidently advancing at a trot, hair and ties windblown. The RPR slogan. Vivement demain!, exhortatory and vacuous, vvell-illustrated the opposition’s electoral problems. Republican party posters featured Giscard in his regulation pullover, while the few Barristes were favoured with the solid photo of their leader. In the provinces, posters were notably less partisan. emphasizing popular notability-or presidential ambition. In Yvelines. Michel Rocard almost blotted out the PS. sharing the hoardings with photos of Barre. Where the RPR-UDF ran united, (usually sharing out the leadership of the legislative and regional lists) they campaigned together and photos of the two t&s de hte together dominated. Local PS posters, especially in the last fortnight before the poll, reflected its tactics. With a very large number of sitting members. often divided by faction, PS legislative and regional candidates campaigned in their own constituencies rather than dipartement-wide. as the best way of getting out the PS vote. Little lists generally lacked money and made little impact in the national, though rather more in the regional, campaign. An exception was former presidential candidate i\!arie-France Garaud. Barre’s Paris submarine against Chirac, who was well-financed-to begin with. The PCF and FN also ran personalized campaigns, the FN around its leader. the PCF around its sitting members and local personalities. The FIN did not appear to want for militants or money. PCF posters, once early, omnipresent and explicitly partisan. were late, sparse. often totally lacking in partisan identification, and sometimes even printed on green paper, the ecologists’ corour. There were few PCF posters-or canvassers-in central Paris (except near the offices of I’Hz~manitQ In the suburbs. once solidly Communist, PCF posters in several dbpartements, including hlarchais’ Val de Mame, showed pictures of local PCF notables, with slogans like, ‘renew your confidence in your elected representative’, or ‘Fidelity! ‘, with no indication of party affiliation. Popular local leaders who disagreed with the party line and had been rewarded with non-electable places on legislative. or the top of regional, lists, were peculiarly prominent on the hoardings. Canvassing. once at saturation level, was now patchy at best.
DAVID B. GOLDEY
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The PCF’s modest aim was not to fall below 10 per cent and to inoculate its remaining voters against the temptation to vote for the PS in the coming presidential election. The party effectively wrote off half the dtpartements, preferring not to exhaust its Limited resources in mobilizing its few remaining voters where it was anyway too weak to win, and where its supporters would probably end by voting PS. Where the PCF was stronger, either electorally and organizationally as around Paris, or with a substantial number of local councillors, mayors and deputies, as in large provincial cities like Le Mans or Le Havre or the south, the PCF set out first to mobilize and discipline its militants and d/us. The two aims were not always compatible, and the former tended to be sacrificed to the latter-old Stalinist organizers emerging from retirement to displace the numerous critics of the party fine. As in other parties, there was difficulty where only the head of the list might hope to be elected; disappointed deputies were sometimes supported by PCF local government ilus, at odds with party policy and fearful for their seats should the electoral alliance with the PS be definitively torpedoed. These tensions surfaced most obviously in the Paris suburbs, in the neighbouring PCF strongholds of Vai de Marne and Seine-St-Denis. The former was the traditiona stronghold of the party’s leaders, and of Marchais’ apparent successor, Jean-Claude Gayssot; the latter was the strongest Communist dttpartement, whose leaders had been openly critical of the national line since 1985. Gayssot was despatched next door to head the list in Seine-StDenis and bring dissidents to heel, together with.party workers from Val de Marne. The French Politbureau did not trust Seine-St-Denis militants who had seen their popular federal secretary kicked upstairs to head the PCF’s regional list for criticizing the party line. There was little comradeship or even contact between the two groups of party workers in the campaign. Putting orthodoxy before efficacy, the PCF leadership was unable altogether to achieve even its limited aim: to mobilize those certain to vote for the PCF, but not floaters who might then drift to the PS. There was just enough manpower, where PCF organization still had substance, to mobilize the faithful, through regular canvassing over six months; but only after the party had changed its line in mid-stream (as it had had to do in 19Si) from concentrating its fire on the PS to explaining that its first priority was to beat the right, and (disingenuously) that the best way to achieve that was to vote Communist.
Divisions
on the Right
The FN also had to overcome a credibility gap: it had to distinguish itself from the respectable right without appearing too extreme or to be helping the left. Le Pen accomplished this with his usual aplomb, arguing that ‘we say out loud what you think to yourself’. The FN held a series of enthusiastic and well-attended Paris meetings. appealing to Vichyite, aighie fraqak, and anti-socialist and anti-immigrant sentiment, the latter themes being much the most deeply feft. The social issue was often a problem for the respectable right: in the provinces, away from the problems of immigration, racial conflict, urban decay and delinquency, opposition deputies opposed to the death penalty were pursued at public meetings by elderly voters obsessed by the notion that the return of the death penalty and forced’labour would reduce criminality, restore order and somehow, perhaps. the settled village society of their chil~o~. The respectable right could not easily follow down this road without offending the principles of its Gaullist and Catholic components and losing part of the centrist electorate. Its campaign was further bedevilled by the competing presidential ambitions of its leaders. Voters were concerned with the standard of living, unemployment and law and order. The
2%
The French
Gene&
ElectIon of 16 MmA
1986
RPR and UDF had laboriously constructed a joint programme. in which much water had been put in their free market. anti-immigrant. wine, and which was predicated on the possibility of a conservative government carrying out the programme under a Socialist President-partly because both Chirac and Giscard needed office to re-establish themselves as credible presidential candidates. Barre, ahead in the opinion polls. and most likely to profit from an early presidential election. rejected the programme as economically unrealistic and incapable of application while hlitterrand remained president. Giscard sought to gain public credit and attention at Chirac’s expense and to provoke the relationship of President and Prime Barre, by concentrating on ‘cohabitation’, hlinister where the latter spoke for an Assembly majority hostile to the President. Giscard claimed this would leave the President impotent: Mitterrand contradicted him. to envenom the debate on the right. Giscard further successfully provoked Barre by inviting him to a public show of support for a programme he rejected. Barre’s intemperate reaction sapped his own credibility on the right, less to the advantage of Giscard but more to the disadvantage of the right as a whole: Giscard’s manceuvres undid the limited coherence of the conservative campaign and hindered its momentum.
Alarms
and Excursions
PS mistakes cost it time more than support. At its autumn Toulouse Congress. Michel Rocard returned with 28 per cent of the delegates, back to his 1979 level in the party. That helped the Rocardians to more places on regional (but not legislative) lists and it helped Jospin move the party away from red-blooded Socialist rhetoric to the modernizing, consensual position of Premier Fabius, the star of the Congress. But Fabius was both prone to temporize and over-confident. First, there was the ‘Greenpeace’ affair, which broke in September. French agents had sabotaged a Friends of the Earth boat in New Zealand intended to disrupt French atomic tests in the south Pacific. French opinion was unmoved by the loss of a life caused by this modest act of international terrorism in the territory of a friendly power; but the government was discredited by its apparent incapacity to control its own secret services, or to cover up more effectively. Mitterrand’s old crony. Minister of Defence Charles Hernu, finally had to carry the can and was forced to resign. Fabius’ most obvious own goal. however. was his November television debate with Jacques Chirac. Fabius counted on heckling Chirac until the RPR leader lost his cool. But Chirac kept his head, and instead the Prime Minister damaged his reputation as a moderate and reasonable man. With Rocard largely absent from television (apparently by mutual agreement with the party) the PS campaign was suddenly left leaderless-until the President stepped in. Mitterrand would almost certainly have intervened in any case. The PS was gaining in the polls from the autumn, so that he could safely expect to claim its continuing rise for himself, reinforcing his position against the right. If the majority against him in the Assembly was large and solid, his position would be intolerable and he would be forced out. Simulations showed that with the new electoral system some 43 per cent of the vote was needed for a clear parliamentary majority. If the FIN took 10 per cent from the right. and the PCF held 10 per cent, then the PS needed to inch over 30 per cent and the RPR-UDF would have only a small majority on their own-or none at all. Fabius’ TV disaster therefore probably did not dictate Mitterrand’s entry into the campaign, but rather its timing. This was both indirect and overt. Leaks from the Elysee contradicted Giscard’s version of cohabitation and kept that issue, which divided the right. alive. There were also two big public meetings, in December and February. in the constituencies of his two prime ministers, Fabius and Mauroy; and two long television
DAVID B. GOLDEY AND R. W. JOHNSON
239
interviews, one early on, the other just before the opening of the official fortnight-long broadcasting campaign. Mitterrand carefully confined his meetings and television appearances to the period before the official campaign period-unlike de Gaulle, Pompidou or Giscard-so the right could less plausibly attack him for taking part in the campaign. His interventions were well-judged and successful. As the last week of the campaign opened-when opinion polls may no longer be published-the result seemed very much in the balance (as Table 2 shows) perhaps to be decided as voters went to the polls. Leaks from the Elysee, repeating Mitterrand’s threats to resign if the right returned with a big majority and pressed him too hard had to compete with news that Muslim fundamentalists in Beirut had taken French hostages, killing one of them. Mitterrand was out to squeeze the PCF, mobilize the hesitant, and cross-pressure the timorous floating voter. The kidnapping added to the uncertainty, but probably buttressed presidential legitimacy rather than sapping it (as, over time, it had done to President Carter). It probably also confirmed those hostile to Arab immigrants in their intention to vote for the FN. Certainly, Chirac’s repeated appeal for a useful right vote for the RPR-UDF at his last big eve of poll Paris meeting, suggested that the RPR’s late private polls were showing the FN doing better than the 7 to 8 per cent credited it in the last published surveys. The opinion surveys, in fact, underestimated the FN and PS votes; and over-estimated support for the RPR-UDF and the PCF. The initial comment on the election was less in response to the actual vote, than a reaction to the expectations created by the polls themselves.
The Pattern
of Candidacies
In effect the elections were fought by four, or perhaps four and a half large parties (for the RPR and UDF ran joint lists in two-thirds of the metropolitan d$uzrtements). The change to PR had little impact on an electorate so thoroughly used to thinking in the old ways that over 93 per cent of the vote was cast for the major parties (RPR, UDF, PS, PCF, FN). The ‘little lists’, which might have been expected to flourish under PR, had signally little success. The pattern of candidacies reflected the heavily national nature of the campaign, with the big parties present everywhere (a lonely exception was the FN’s withdrawal of its candidate in Southern Corsica in a vain attempt to secure the election of a friendly UDF). The list system enabled the parties to attempt to buy-in all manner of minority tendencies, ranging from the thirteen members of the press baron, Robert Hersant’s, entourage present on various UDF and RPR lists to the PS’s adoption of the dissident Communist, Henri Fiszbin, in Alpes-Maritimes; its vain attempt to impose Michel Baylet, honorary president of the MRG (and government minister) in Tam-et-Garonne; and its more successful attempt to impose the renegade ex-UDF, Olivier Stirn, in Manche. Inevitably, a great deal of attention centred on Barre’s successful campaign in favour of his own candidate, Christine Boutin, against the official UDF list in Yvelines, and on the extent of his support for Marie-France Garaud in Paris in an apparent attempt to shave valuable votes away from Chirac. Barre came to Paris and campaigned both for the official UDF list-and Mme Garaud. There seemed little doubt that Mme Garaud’s remarkably well financed campaign (Barre’s own treasurer was second on the Garaud list) represented a vain attempt to give Chirac some of the same problems in Paris that the RPR’s Michel Noir was (far more successfully) giving Barre in Lyon. The real contest on the right, however, was the contest between UDF (or surrogates) and the RPR in 35 dijartements. While lip service was paid to right unity and stress laid on the joint UDF-RPR lists in the other 61 d+urtements, the fact was that the 35 included all the large dbpartements, so that the UDF and RPR were in competition for more than half the
The French
240 TABLE 2.
The evolution of opinion, October
Poll Date of sample Month published Extreme left PCF PS Other left Total left Ecologist RPR-UDF Other right FN Total right
General Election of 16 ,Clarcb 19SG
1985-March 1986 (as a percentage of those expressing a voting intention)’
SOFRES
SOFRES
IFOP
SOFRES
WA
IFOP
Oct.
Nov.
Nov.
Dec.
Dec.
Jan.
2 10 23
2 10 22
1 10 26
3:
3: 4
2 11 ‘7 1 41
1 10.5 26.5 3 41
1.5 11 28 1 41.5
2
3 48.5 1
3 45 5.5 8.5 59
4
3: 4
43
45
43
; 60
: 55
9” 58
44 4.5 8.5 57
5t.5
Adapted from G. Le Gall, ‘Sondages: l’etat de l’opinion’. Revue Politigue et Padementaire, 921, January- February 1986 and Libe’rution, 14 March 1986. SOFRES polls originally in Le Figaro. fFOP in Le Point, BVA in Paris-Match. l
seats at stake. (Though in the Gironde, with 11 seats at stake, the UDF thought better of trying to challenge Chaban-Delmas in his fief, preferring to accept humiliatingly poor terms for a joint list.) There were also a number of RPR-UDF fights in small dpartements due to irreconcilable local rivalries. In the end these divisions within the right were to play a crucial role. The heavy weighting given to large or united lists by the highest average rule meant that the UDF and RPR thereby sacrificed just enough seats to ensure that they did not, on their own, have an overall parliamentary majority. The benefits went notably to the left: in general the FN did well enough to earn their seats whatever the RPR and UDF did. Competition between the RPR and UDF did not appear to deprive the FN of any support, any more than primaries under the old system in 1973-8 had increased the potential right wing vote. The PCF frequently owed seats to the division of the right. but the PS-as the largest party the inevitable beneficiary of the highest average system-benefited most from the divisions of its opponents. Overall, the main effect of PR was undoubtedly to maintain the left’s strength at an otherwise unhoped-for level. The PCF, with 9.7 per cent of the vote and only 5.8 per cent of the seats, complained bitterly about the unfairness of the highest average rule: but the truth was that without PR the party’s representation would have been virtually wiped out. The FN had been born of PR (in the 1984 European elections): in 1986, with 9.8 per cent of the vote and 6.3 per cent of the seats, it knew better than to complain. The UDF and RPR took 48.8 per cent of the seats with their 42 per cent of the vote--about the same advantage as the PS’s 37.1 per cent of the seats from 31.6 per cent of the vote. But the left had totalled only 44 per cent of the vote. Under a majority system there is little doubt that this would have guaranteed a majority for the right equivalent to the left majority in 1981-especially given the likelihood of FN votes collapsing to the orthodox Right on a second ballot and the tremendous barriers against PS-PCF co-operation in 1986 (calculations based on the old assumption of second ballot). Left unity under a majority system could only mask the extent to which PR, in the very different political circumstances of 1986, had saved the PS-and thus the President-from a major rout. Although the elections had been long anticipated as a dramatic show-down, turnout was
DAVID B. GOLD&Y xm
R. W. JOHNSO~V
241
TABLE 2 (cont’d).
SOFRES
BVA
LFOP 27 Jan.1 Feb. Feb.
BVA 15-20 Jan. Feb.
SOFRES 25-30 Jan. Feb.
IFOP 17-22 Feb. Mar.
BVA 28 Feb.2 Mar. Maf.
SOFRES 28 Feb.4 Mar. Mar.
2
2 11 26.5 1.5 41 45
1.5 10.5 27.5 2.5 42 3.5 45 2
1.5 11 30 1.5 44 2 45 2.5 6.5 54
3 10.5 28 1.5 43 1.5 44 3.5 8 55.5
Jan.
Jan.
1.5
1.5 40 3
2 10.5 27 2.5 42 1.5
::.5 1.5 42 3
2.5 10.5 28.5 1 42.5 2
44 4
45 4
46 2
47 2
9 57
7.5 56.5
7 55
6.5 55.5
2
3.5 8.5 57
5:::
Result
% vote 16 Mar. ~ _ 1.5 9.7 31.6 1.2 44 1.2 42 2.9 9.9 54.8
surprisingly low: of legislative elections in the Fifth Republic only 1962 and 1981 had seen fewer people vote. In part this was a reflection of the change in the electoral system which left some confused and which did away with the often highly-charged battles in singlemember seats; and no doubt disillusion with party politics and the tedium of the campaign counted for something too. But there was no doubt that differential abstention. which had cost the right so dear in 1981, now cost the left around 2 per cent of the vote. with the Communists suffering most. Not only were traditional left voters disgusted that the first left government in a generation had actually increased unemployment, but the dramatic erosion of the PCF machine simply made it far harder to pull out the alsvays marginal voters at the bottom of the social heap. Nearly one and a quarter million people spoilt their ballots: more, both in absolute and percentage terms than in any election since modern records were kept. To some extent disillusion, tedium and a protest against the system of blocked party lists may account for this, but the new electoral system and the fact that regional elections were held on the same day left many voters hopelessly confused. (Spoilt ballots were even higher in the regionals and the rate was highest of all in small rural dipartements.) The left, with its greater reliance on poorer and less educated voters, seems likely to have suffered most. For. as Table 4 shows, the respectable right, even with the added force of the FN, succeeded in mobilizing a smaller pro~rtion of the registered electorate than in 1974 or 1978 at the toff~dec~s~’ the real difference lay in the left’s even poorer mobilization.
The Right The UDF and RPR, who had looked forward to a massive triumph in 1986, thus did not fare pa~icu~ar~y well: in their dreadful year of 1981 they had taken 40.07 per cent of the vote between them; at the 1984 European election this had risen to 43.02 per cent: now they were down to 42.03 per cent. Five years of ferocious- and often feverish-propaganda against the left had, in the end, worked almost exclusively to the benefit of the FN. There was certainly no note of triumph on the right as it became clear that a parliamentary
The French Genera! Efection of 16 March I 9%
242
TABLE 3. French legislative elections,
Ext. Register
1973 1978 1981 1986
1973 1978 1981 1986
29.9 34.4 35.5 36.6
Abst.
left
Votes 5.6 6.1 10.4 9.1
Comm.
1973-86
(Metropolitan
Socialist and other left
Gaullist
France only) cons. centrist
Ext. right
(millions) at tirst or, in 1986, sole ballot 4.5 6.7 5.6’ 0.76 5.1 7.3 6.45 7.4 0.95 5.9 ;:; 5.2 5.4 0.33 4.0 11.2’ 0.42 2.7
Votes (%) 3.3 3.33 1.33 1.5
0.7 0.9 0.09 2.76”
at first or, in 1986, sole ballot 22.0 23.9 26.5 21.4 25.8 22.35 25.0 20.6 38.3 20.9 21.8 16.1 32.8 42.03s 9.69
2.8 0.9 0.4 9.87
Seats Other right 1973 1978 1981 1986
73 86 43 32
102 112 282 211
176 144 83 140
122 132 66 126
115 35
Total 473 474 474 555
1. Since some Centrists and Giscardians stood without Gauflist opposition but others ran in ‘primaries’ against Gaullists, this figure somewhat exaggerates their strength at the expense of the Gaullists. 2. 3.14m. for separate RPR lists; 2.33m. for separate UDF lists; and 602m. for joint UDF-RPR lists. 3. 11.5 % for RPR alone; 9.53% for UDF alone; 21% for UDF-RPR joint lists. 4. Includes 20,876 votes (0.07%) for dissident FN lists. 5. Elected against official RP~UDF lists but often dissident RPRs or UDFs in practice who tended to rejoin their former parties once in Parliament.
majority would depend on a small handful of potentially fickle right wing independents and on the results in the 22 overseas seats. There was a general tendency to blame Barre for the bad result and certainly his divisive tactics had not helped; but the right had probably also hurt itself by giving in to the pressures of its old notables instead of bringing on a new generation of candidates, and by its dull and disunited campaign. The various formations of the respectable right had, in fact, done little more than retain the same old electorate which is, at both local and national level, legitimist in outlook, voting RPR or UDF almost indifferently, depending on which party was already best esconced in their d~pa~t~~e~t. Thus, as Table 5 shows, most UDF-RPR contests were won by large margins by the already sitting party. There were particular grimaces within the RPR, whose lead in seats over the UDF was nothing like so substantial as had been hoped, and because the right’s tiny overall parliamentary majority was a fragile base from which to confront the President. There were even occasional mutterings that Chirac and To&on had not made a very good fist of the negotiations with the UDF. In fact it was not clear that the RPR could have done much better; the general pressure for united right lists had been too strong to buck. Although the RPR did beat the UDF in 22 of the 35 dbpartements where they competed, this was almost wholly a reflection of the enormous political impact of Chirac’s control of Paris and Gaullist implantation in the region. In the capital and the seven surrounding dipartements of the
DAVID B. GOLDEYAND R. W. JOHNSON
243
TABLE 4. The tour dtkis$, 1974-86 (% of registered electorate)
Legislative Presidential Legislative Presidential Legislative Legislative
1973 1974 1978 1981 198 1 1986
Left
Right
35.9 42.8 40.1 43.8 40.1 33.1
37.0 43.9 42.1 40.1 32.2 41.0’
* Including FN. RPR, UDF and other right alone= 33.5%.
he-de-France, the RPR trounced the UDF in every case, winning by better than 2 to 1 in both seats and votes. The other 27 intra-Right contests in the rest of France were far more even, the RPR winning 13, the UDF 14. By far the most dramatic results came in Bouchesdu-Rhone (the Marseille region) where the RPR utterly collapsed, to the benefit of the FN and UDF, the Gaullist list taking only 9.47 per cent of the vote, thus losing almost half the votes won by Chirac, DebrC and Garaud in 1981. In Rh6ne (the Lyon region) Barre’s anticipated triumph went sour, providing the most sensational single result of the whole election. Not only did Charles Hernu, the ‘patriotic’ anti-hero of the Greenpeace affair easily fulfil his long-odds boast of running far ahead of Barre, but the former premier only just scraped in ahead of the RPR list led by the energeticjeune loup, Michel Noir-who was immediately rewarded with a Cabinet .position by a grateful and clearly delighted Chirac. TABLE 5. Margins of victory (RPR over UDF, UDF over RPR) in 35 dbpartements with competing UDF and RPR lists, 1986 (% vote) l Lead Over 10% 5-10% Under 5%
RPR ahead 14 .:
UDF ahead Total 8 3 1
22 8 5
* Source: A. Lancelot, ‘Le briselame: les elections du 16 mars 1986’, Projet, 199, May- June 1986.
Barre’s setback-with its implications for the next presidential election-was undoubtedly caused by the way in which he chose to play presidential politics in a legislative campaign. Barre’s studied critique of cohabitation made sense as an attempt to destabilize Chirac’s presidential hopes, but it upset conservative voters anxious only for right wing unity in 1986. Similarly, Barre’s initiation of a local pact with all the other major party candidates whereby they agreed to avoid mention of racist themes was a wise move in its presenation of Barre’s centrist presidential image. But it had the effect of leaving a free run for the FN which, revelling in the fact, shaved large numbers of votes from Barre’s total, to the angry frustration of Barre’s local advisers who had endlessly warned him of the risks he was running, to no avail. For the UDF the most threatening fact of all was that the RPR had actually run ahead of Barre in the city of Lyon itself, thus threatening its municipal control of
244
The French General Election of 16 March 1986
France’s second city. With Paris already irrecoverably in Chirac’s hands. the UDF-and Barre--cannot afford to lose Lyon. But. unless Barre wins the 1988 presidential election, this now seems distinctively likely in 1989. The relatively poor UDF-RPR performance-in 33 of the 96 metropolitan d@arlemeats they actually polled a smaller percentage of the vote than in 1981-was due partly to a nationalization of the vote, with the orthodox right, like the PS. doing best in its weakest seats, less well in its redoubts; and partly to the simple fact of PS success. But most of all, of course, it was due to the success of the FN.
The National
Front
The FN had seen its vote fall back in percentage terms from its 1984 levels-but by nothing like as much as the polls had forecast, and in absolute terms it had won an extra half a million votes. Perhaps even more important symbolically was the fact that in metropolitan France itself (though not overall when the overseas votes were added in) the FN had overtaken the PCF. Not only did the FN run ahead of the PCF in 49 out of 96 dipartements, but it did so in all the large cities, even surpassing the PCF in a majority of the major towns in Seine-StDenis, once the reddest of red dipartements. This performance naturally gave further life to the old argument that the FIN was simply stealing large numbers of votes from the extreme left and transferring them to the extreme right, but this remained largely untrue. At the most, defecting left voters made up one-fifth of the FN vote (such transfers were greatest in the south), and ex-Socialists were far more likely to behave thus than ex-Communists. Overwhelmingly the FN’s votes were taken from the UDF and (especially) the RPR. None the less, the FN’s vote changed noticeably since 1984, moving further away from the classic profile of a right wing party. In 1984 the FN had done notably well among the upper middle classes and practising Catholics, but by 1986 the bishops’ anti-racist counter-offensive and the more mundane pressures of the vote utile squeezed the FN’s vote among these groups. This produced heavy falls in the FN vote in many comfortable quurtiers but particularly in the Paris region: although the FN still elected ten of its deputies there almost half of all the FN’s national losses were suffered in this region alone. Overall, only 66 per cent of those who had voted for the FN in 1984 did so again in 1986, 30 per cent returning to the RPR and UDF, 4 per cent elsewhere.8 But the FN almost wholly compensated for these losses by making further gains. largely among voters in the lower social classes. The FIN did notably well among men (who made up 63 per cent of its electorate), among the young (11 per cent of new voters supported it). and among the unemployed (different exit polls showed 11 per cent, 14 per cent, and 17 per cent of the jobless supporting the FN)9 what was not in doubt was that the FIN had increased its support in this group-SOFRES showed 12 per cent of the unemployed as FIN voters in 1984, 17 per cent in 1986. to The young, the male and the unemployed are all traditionally left wing groups in France and it was the addition of such groups to its otherwise cross-class support which gave the 1986 FN electorate its distinctively more ‘popular’ flavour. The fact that so few FN voters claim to have defected from the left does not sit easily with the fact of FN strength among such traditionally left wing groups. Part of the answer lies in the simple reluctance of those who now follow Le Pen to admit that not long ago they were supporting Mitterrand or Marchais. More significant is the fact that the FN is recruiting successfully among the working class and unemployed young. While 11 per cent of all new voters supported the FN, only 2 per cent of (middle class) students said that the FN was the party they felt closest to: so to achieve its overall 11 per cent figure the FN must have done particularly well among the lower class young. Strikingly, while only 7 per cent of young
DAVIDB.GOLDEY.AXD
R. W.JOHNSON
245
women aged 18-20 voted FN, 15 per cent of their male peers did so. *1 This is exactly the group that would formerly have voted PCF. In other words, the FN stole a good portion of the PCF’s potential electorate before it had formed any effective partisan attachment. It is not so much that the FIN stole votes that the PCF had, rather that it took votes the PCF ‘ought’ to have had. These young working class or unemployed men-much in evidence in leather jackets at FN meetings, where they mix incongruously with the 50 to 64 year olds (the age group amongst which the FN gets its best score of all)-are one of the most volatile and potentially decisive sections of the electorate. Typically, they are the first victims of economic austerity. Brought up in a somewhat left wing environment, but utterly disenchanted with what left rute has brought, they are an easy catch for the racist excitements of Le Pen rallies. Indifferent to appeals for a vote utile and certainly not for the RPR-UDF-seen as the old gang who exude the privileged aroma of the chateau, a world away from the squalid realities of life in the big city banlieu, they resemble the Wallace voters of 1968, disillusioned with the Democrats but not ready to vote Republican. Such young men are often only semi-educated. They have inhaled Le Pen’s slogans along with the normal teen culture. They don’t like immigrants and-often thanks to the FN-they know that Fabius, Badinter, Veil, Stasi and Fiterman are all Jews who seem always to favour the liberal causes and the immigrants they have been exhorted to hate. They are an undeniably dangerous and unstable group but they are probably not yet irrecoverably won for any cause, If the left is to win the next presidential election it will have to make this group one of its key targets. Even at the moment of casting their 1986 vote FN supporters said they would split only 72-11 per cent for Chirac against Mitterrand in a presidential contest, with 17 per cent undecided. l2 With Le Pen having decided that his movement is far more likely to prosper under continued left rule and that he will not, in any event, support an orthodox right wing candidate on a presidential second ballot, the future political behaviour of the FN voters of 1986 is by no means a certain quantity. For the moment, though, 1986 saw the FN consolidate its position right along the southern littoral, frequentIy increasing its 1984 score. Its most dramatic success came in Marseille where it increased its 1984 vote by 71,000 and emerged as the leading party of the Right-as it did throughout the Bouches-du-Rh6ne dbpartement. But the FN also ran ahead of the RPR in Gard and Var, and ahead of the UDF in Seine-et-Marne, Seine-St-Denis, Aveyron and Herault. With the return of the single member two ballot system it now seems likely that in all these areas the FN will be one of the two contestants in any conservative ‘primary’, squeezing one or other of the two mainstream conservative parties out of the game (though probably more to the advantage of the remaining big right party than to itself). Undoubtedly the FN would have emerged as one of the leading parties of the right in many other dipartements as well but for the prevalence of united UDF-RPR lists. Any large-scale return to UDF v. RPR ‘primaries’ in a two ballot system will thus pose some delicate problems for the conventional right, if only in the shape of the necessary auction for pivotal FN votes at the second ballot. This will be important almost everywhere, at least at the next general election, for the FN too witnessed a nationalizing effect in 1986, frequently making useful inroads in its weaker areas such as the Nord, Pas-de-Calais, and the Moselle valley. The Communist
Collapse
If the FN’s showing was one of the major dramas of the election, the continued collapse of the PCF was certainly the other. The dead weight of the leadership’s suicidal line was eloquently attested to by the way that dissident but popular Communist mayors frequently
246
The French
General Election of 16 h4arch 1986
ran ahead of the PCF’s legislative score in the regional contests. The vote utile motive undoubtedly explained a large number of defections to the PS, but with both the PCF and PS losing votes compared with 1981 it was evident that a large number of PCF votes were lost to the left altogether: a study of PCF bureaux de vote in Paris showed, too, that many more had retreated into embittered abstention. Even more disastrous for the PCF was the way in which the young turned against it erz masse. As a parti passoire it has always had to live with a high level of defection among the older age groups, losses which it generally made good by large-scale recruitment of the young. Thus. for example, in 1978 the PCF took 20.5 per cent of the total vote but won the support of 28 per cent of the 18 to 24 age group. In 1981 the comparable figures were 16 per cent and 18 per cent: in 1986 they were 9.7 per cent and 8 per cent-that is the PCF was now doing worse amongst the young than amongst all others.13 Even children of PCF permanents are defecting from the party now and real drames familiales beset many traditional PCF households. One result is that the PCF increasingly resembles the SF10 of the Fourth Republic-an overwhelmingly male party, dangerously over-dependent on an ageing and diminishing Resistance generation in its few areas of remaining influence. The PCF is being peeled like an onion, with its peripheral layers being remorselessly shed: women, white collar workers, the young and all voters in areas of previous PCF weakness. But while it is statistically true that the PCF is falling back ever more upon its bastions, it is now an exaggeration to speak of anywhere as a PCF bastion. In Seine-St-Denis, where as recently as 1978 the PCF took every seat in the dkpartement, in 1986 it could manage only 3 out of 13. In Paris, once a PCF stronghold, the Party failed to win a single seat. As Table 6 shows, 1986 was merely the latest dramatic chapter in a long history of decline. Even more threatening to the PCF is the fact that it ran ahead of the PS in only one (rural) dipartement (Cher), and that in the 52 towns of over 30,000 population with PCF mayors, the PCF ran ahead of the PS in only 19 in 1986. Such figures imply the virtual annihilation of the PCF at any future two-ballot parliamentary election, and the decimation of its once substantial municipal strength-which is crucial to what remains of the Party’s organization. The real question now is simply whether the PCF can survive for very much longer at all as an independent force in French politics, even if it retains some industrial strength. In 1986 it was only the divisions between the UDF and RPR which allowed it to win the 30 seats required to constitute a parliamentary group. With the present Party leadership still apparently set on going down with the ship rather than relinquish control, even a major split TABLE 6. PCF vote by dipartement
in legislative
elections, 1967-86’
Under 5% 5-10% lo-15% 15-20% 20-25% 25-30% 30-35% Over 35%
1967
1973
1978
1981
1986
0 6 17 21 21 18 9 3
0 10 13 28 23 12 9 1
15 27 20 17 7 1
25 17 13 9 2 1
26 ! 0 0 0
* Source: G. Le Gall, ‘Mars 1986: Des Elections de Transition?‘, Revue Politique et Parlementuire, 922, March-April 1986.
DAVID B. GOLDEY AND R.
W. JOHNSOX
247
in the PS might not be enough to save the PCF. Its only remaining trump is its control of the CGT trade union-which continues to lose members because of its Communist links.
The Socialist
Party
As against this, the PS emerged so powerfully-the biggest party in France with almost onethird of the vote-that its leaders behaved as if the result was a triumph, not a defeat. In some cases triumph it was: in Seine-Maritime and Belfort, Fabius and Chevenement respectively, actually increased the PS vote over its 1981 high-water mark, while Jospin in Paris and Lang in Loir-et-Cher came close to equalling the 1981 PS vote. The PS wave was particularly strong in the Paris region where, in one formerly red d+artenent after another, the PS surged effortlessly past the PCF. There is indeed no red belt left: in the seven dcipartements of the Paris banlieu the PS took 26 seats to the PCF’s 10 (the RPR taking 22, the UDF 12 and the FN 8). Elsewhere the general pattern of the PS vote was for the steepest fails to take place in its old redoubts, with the best performances coming where it had been weaker. This is, of course, a textbook definition of what the nationalization of political behaviour means. None the less, the PS had lost about one-sixth of its 1981 vote and, compared with 1981, it had lost support in every socioeconomic category. But among two groups-the 50 to 64 age group and the classic petite-bourgeoisie (shopkeepers, artisans, etc.) it lost almost half its 198 I share of the vote. In general the PS, more than any other French party, now best fulfils the classic inter-class profile of the catch-all party, but with a strong accent towards the under 34s and white collar voters. The PS still has notable areas of weakness among the over 65s and farmers, but it was striking too that the PS performed at only an average level-or even below it-among the unemployed. Perhaps most dramatic of all was the fact that the PS-for the first time in the history of French socialism-received more votes from women than from men. Recent debates within the PS have seen a great deal of talk about the need to reinforce the party’s organization, modernize its ideology, and generally consolidate the PS into a modern but still disciplined socialist party of government. Not too much attention need be paid to most such talk, for the 1986 result showed only too clearly what sort of party the PS has actually become. Its electorate is far too diverse to allow of any systematic ideological expression and shows a distinct bulge towards the middle and lower middle levels of the social structure, away from the really disadvantaged dasses below that-hardly what one expects of a traditional Left electorate, but perhaps what one should expect of a potential majoritarian party. More worrying to the PS is the fact that its electorate is far too heavily dependent on marginally committed voters-who don’t join political parties. It is unlikely that the PS is ever going to attract many more than its present 200,000 members. Above all, its electorate is volatile. Around 45 per cent of the 18 to 34 age group had supported it in 1981; a whole half of them defected by 1984; and then two-thirds or more of those lost voters came surging back in 1986. It is, moreover, increasingly a leadership, not an ideology-driven party. It depended utterly in 1986 on Mitterrand’s prestige and imp&ion and the resuhs gained by Fabius, Chevenement, Jospin, Lang and Hernu all illustrate that the aura of leadership and governmental autho~ty was crucial at lower levels as well. It is a catch-all party in the sense that it is seen increasingly as being Ioosely coterminus with ‘the Left’-hitting not only the PCF but also the Ecologists (whose vote did not improve from its 198 1 misery level) and the MRG (who elected only one deputy); but also in the sense that within the electorate it now corresponds merely to a broad and diffuse set of sensibilities with
248
The French General Election o/ I6 March 1986
little programmatic content of any kind. Such managerialist style of a Fabius, the ever-vaguer of the US Democratic party favoured by some above all, the party of Mitterrandist legitimacy. ideological mould.
The Nationalization
a party may well provide a base for the new republicanism of a Chevenement or the style Rocardians. But at the moment the party is, It is unlikely to be recast into any disciplined
and Homogenization
of Party
Support
Overall, the election saw a move not only towards the nationalization of political forces but towards their social homogenization. At the party level what has happened since 198 1 is a complex domino-effect, with the PCF losing voters primarily to the PS and abstention, the PS losing to the orthodox right, and the right to the FN-together, of course, with lesser movements direct from PCF and PS to the FN, and even some minor contra-flows from the right to the left. What this meant was a dramatic decline in the class cleavage: whereas threequarters of the industrial working class had voted Left in the mid-1970s in 1986 only 54 per cent did so. Among all wage and salary-earners the proportion voting Left fell from 63 per cent in 1978 to 50 per cent in 1986. (The swing was most notable among private sector workers.) Wage and salary-earners have thus shown a swing against the left almost three times greater than the electorate as a whole. Just as striking was the political homogenization between the sexes (see Table 7). The swing to the right in 1986 was thus considerably greater among men. With the swing to the right among workers, providing a notable echo of the 1979 British, and 1980 American elections, suggesting a genuine sociological configuration for the emergence of the ‘new Right’. It is even possible that a gender gap in favour of the left may be about to open up in France, for while only 40 per cent of young men aged 18 to 20 voted Left, 53 per cent of their female peers did so.14 This new pattern may well not prove stable, however, for it results from two highly dynamic elements, the sharp decline of the PCF and the simultaneous success of the FN in attracting a more popular electorate. Again, the breakdown of voting by sex provides the clearest illustration (see Table 8). The process of homogenization thus rests essentially on the identical twin poles of the FN and the PCF, with their disproportionately male electorates. Once these are established as ‘givens’, it follows that all others must have a feminine predominance. But that in turn means that a continued process of homogenization rests on these two extreme minor blocs remaining stable-which seems doubly unlikely. The PCF appears to be headed for continued rapid decline and how the FN electorate holds together through ‘cohabitation’, a return to majority voting and the ensuing presidential election is an open question. What has happened at the moment is the fulfilment-to a quite extreme degree-of the tendency towards a quadrilateralization of political forces with the rise of the central blocs. But now, instead of the RPR constituting the rightward wing of that quadrilateral, the FN does instead and the RPR, conflated with the UDF, has become one of the two majoritarian central blocs. Powerful pressures exist to maintain this effective fusion of the RPR and UDF-disunity will let either the FN or PCF win extra seats and will be poorly received by an essentially undifferentiated UDF-RPR electorate. But it also seems certain that the first ballot of the next presidential election will shatter the RPR-UDF parliamentary alliance, as the second ballot will tend to reunite the conservative electorate. If either party’s contender wins that contest he will be likely to try to consolidate the supremacy of his’own particular party at the expense of its ally. This too will have centrifugal effects and may de-stabilize the neat picture of homogenization before it has set in any mould. Moreover, Chirac’s reintroduction of the
DAVID 8. GOLDEYAND R. W. JOHNSON
249
TABLE 7. Percentage of men and women voting for
the right, French legislative elections, 1967-86 1967
1973
1978
1981
Women Men
65 48
59
51
44
55
50
45
41
55
Difference
17
9
6
3
0
Source: 0. Duhamel and E. Dupoirier, 21-27 March 1986.
1986
t ‘fipess,
TABLE 8. Percentage of men and women voting for parties, 1986
Men Women
PCF
PS
RPR/UDF
FN
12 7
Other
30
40
12
6
34
45
7
7
old electoral system will have the effect of all but eliminating both the PCF and FN from the parliamentary-and thus possibly the electoral-scene altogether. Either way, it is difficult now to imagine the effective dominance of the PS and RPR-UDF being broken. One cannot but be impressed by the long-term nature of many of the trends observed above. The presidential domination of the political system, which lies at the root of so many of these trends and which this election illustrated once again, is not going to go away.
‘Cohabitation’
or ‘Coexistence’
The disappointed expectation of a safe majority in Parliament for the respectable right, fostered by the opinion polls, and the better than anticipated showing of the PS structured early interpretations of the results. The right was more subdued and the PS more optimistic than the electoral result appeared to warrant; for the dipartemental PR electoral system chosen by the outgoing government had accomplished its purpose: depriving the right of a parliamentary majority equal to that enjoyed by the PS in 198 1, that it would have had if the old second ballot majority system had been maintained. The sense that the PS and the President had saved their chestnuts from the fire and the thin Assembly majority for the RPR-UDF created a climate favourable to Mitterrand in the potentially difficult transition period. That allowed the President temporarily to take the initiative from Chirac in the formation of a new government, as he had seized it in the campaign, justifying the forebodings of some RPR deputies that their leader would be no match for Mitterrand in the manceuvring for position inherent in cohabitation. Moreover, despite the lengthy public debate within the right over cohabitation (Giscard’s phrase), Mitterrand, with his experience of the Fourth Republic had thought more profoundly and practically about the likely problems of coexistence (his word). Mitterrand had dreamed of what was the nightmare not only of the RPR-UDF but also of the PS: a hung parliament with no right wing majority without the FN. That would have
250
The Franc-h GenerJ Election qi 16 Alarch 1986
embarrassed the respectable right; encouraged Le Pen to up the ante and demand a ministry: and been used as an excuse for the PS to enter a coalition government to keep the FN out. But PS participation in right wing government would have placed great strains on the cohesion of the PS and allon- the PCF to cry treason, again making the PS vulnerable to PCF reproach. as it had its predecessor (the SFIO) in the Fourth Republic. However, such a coalition government, with an unstable majority, would have given Mitterrand the maximum room for manoeuvre, and there were potential prime ministers for it, waiting in the wings. Jacques Chaban-Delmas was one: Pompidou’s prime minister, defeated for the presidency in 1974 by Giscard and Chirac, and Mitterrand’s old crony from the previous Republic. Mme Simone Veil. Giscard’s most popular minister, head of the joint RPR-UDF list for the 1984 European election was another. After a notable absence from the campaign she suddenly reappeared on television the night of the election-in a tricolour costume. In the event, the slim majority for the respectable right precluded such combinations, provided RPR and UDF could overcome their rivalries. Leaders of the two formations thus met in the Paris city hall to limit the scope of presidential discretion, although constitutionally Mitterrand had a free choice of prime minister. They would accept no one who had not obtained their prior approval: who had not negotiated and run on the joint RPR-UDF programme; and who had not participated actively in the joint campaign. These conditions effectively eliminated Barre. \‘eil and Chaban. They demonstrated how much the right feared Mitterrand’s fine Italian hand, but the conditions had the effect of committing the Gaullists and their allies to the rigime despurtis, so often, eloquently and effectively decried by the General. That, in turn. allowed hlitterrand to strike his preferred Gaullian posture of presidential rectitude, above the party melee. Mitterrand consulted his friends and his recently named President of the Constitutional Council, former Minister of Justice Robert Badinter. On Monday night he appeared briefly on television, from the Elysee. to assert the primacy of his office: the President was charged with seeing that the Constitution was respected; he alone chose the prime minister. The country had spoken: there was a clear if narrow majority. He wished it success by its own lights. Only then was Chirac summoned to the Elysee and given the task of constructing a government for presidential approval. He was not yet officially named prime minister, however. Mitterrand let it be known that the foreign affairs and defence portfolios-the ‘reserved sector’-should be held by nominees acceptable to him. He objected to Jean Lecanuet, President of the UDF, at Foreign Affairs as too Atlantic and European-a reproach shared by the Gaullists; to Leotard at Defence as too inexperienced; and to Charles Pasqua (Chirac’s bully boy) at Interior, and Alain Madelin, for insulting the President. To the fury of Lecanuet and the chagrin of Leotard, Chirac gracefully gave way on what he had never been inclined to give away in any case. Lecanuet refused anything but the foreign ministry and Leotard had to be satisfied with Culture (including broadcasting). Other young Republican turks got Industry (Madelin) and Posts & Telecommunications, with its large R. 81 D. budget (Longuet). Pierre Mehaignerie, leader of the CDS was rewarded with a large Ministry of Equipment & Housing, to remind his party of what they might enjoy if they abandoned Raymond Barre. Chirac, however, kept the key ministries of Interior and Finance for his faithful followers, Pasqua and Balladur, showing the limits of his willingness to compromise with the President or the UDF. Edouard Balladur had been Pompidou’s general secretary of the Elysee and was Chirac’s latest preferred counsellor, who had convinced him to calm down, promise less, and serve as prime minister under a Socialist President. Giscard had unrealistically coveted an enlarged Ministry of Finance and Reconstruction, which would have made him the second prime minister and placed him in the 1988 presidential stakes. Denied that, he
DAVIDB.
G~LDEY AXD
R.
W. JOHNKIN
251
announced his candidacy for the presidency of the Assembly-which had been promised to Chaban as compensation for getting out of Chirac’s way for the premiership. What was striking in Chirac’s cabinet-making was that he set out to accomplish at ministerial level what he had signally failed to achieve with his parliamentary personnel: to bypass and replace the old leaders from previous conservative administrations, and bring forward a new, young and (hopefully) attractive cohort, beholden to him. He succeeded in so doing, at the cost of the solid enmity of those bypassed in the UDF and also in the RPR. (They were soon to return the favour by criticizing him from the right.) The FN was also studiously ignored, despite Le Pen’s insistence that it too was part of the new right wing majority; but in the regions, the FN negotiated with local RPR-UDF leaders, who got FN support in exchange for FN posts in the regional executive, both where the party was necessary for a conservative majority-and where it was not (see the article by Sonia Mazey, p. 297). Mitterrand could influence Chirac’s cabinet-making, then, thanks to the narrow political balance, and their shared interest in maintaining cohabitation/coexistence, partly because of its general popularity. In these circumstances Mitterrand had real but limited power-and he made the most of it. He clearly distanced himself from an administration whose policies he opposed, by refusing to be photographed with the government-or even shaking hands with all its members at cabinet meetings. He made it clear he would not aid the government by signing the necessary ordinances if it took decree powers to lift administrative restraints on declaring redundancies, or denationalize firms taken into public ownership before 198 1, or if it gerrymandered the new constituencies for the restored second ballot majority system. The government could bypass his opposition by taking the longer legislative route in the former two cases, but in the latter its majority might not stand the strain of an extended parliamentary debate. Moreover, he counted on the Constitutional Council to further constrain the government on privatization and redistricting. Effective power thus passed from the Elysee to Matignon, but the government’s fragile majority enabled the President to delay, set down markers and appeal to public opinion. Those deprived of office, led by Giscard, Lecanuet, some Barristes (though not their leader) and Le Figaro (impatient for the revocation of the 1984 press law and the sale of one of the state television stations) were quick to criticize the government for not going far and fast enough. Just as the left had, the right discovered that its electoral panaceas were not all entirely or immediately applicable in practice. The sniping from his rear weakened Chirac’s vir-&is Mitterrand and allowed the President to make good on some of his threats, whereas against a solid, united majority he would have had ‘to give way or get out’. What was clear was that the constitutional experiment was extremely popular with the French electorate, which saw in it an expression of an underlying national consensus, a promise of moderation in policy-and the hope of no presidential election until the end of Mitterrand’s normal term in 1988. That helped Mitterrand in the polls more than Chirac, who had the more partisan role; and it bound the two opponents together-temporarily. For neither could count on the experiment going to term; each was looking for the favourable ground and moment to push the other into breaking the pact; both were preparing for a trial of strength in late 1986 or early 1987-probably a presidential contest a year early. In other words, the competition for the next presidential election, which structured the parliamentary campaign, continues unavowed and unabated. On the left, it is likely to reinforce the predominance of the PS; on the right, the party of the candidate of the RPR or (less clearly) the UDF, who wins through to the run-off. Despite the worst result for the left in 20 years in 1986, it would be an incautious observer now who would be willing to bet on the outcome of the continuing struggle for power.
252
The French General Election of 16 March 19~6 Notes
and References
1. Realigning election G. Le Gall. ‘Le nouvel order electoral’, Revue Politique & Parlementaire (RPP), 893. July-August 1981; for an analysis of the results and their significance, see D. B. Goldey and A. F. Knapp, ‘Time for a Change’. Electoralstudies, 1:l. 1982, and 1:2, 1982. 2. For the evolution of public opinion. 198 l-85, see the successive volumes of SOFRES, L ‘Opinion publique, 1984; 1985; 2 986 (Paris, 1984, 1985 and 1986); Jean-Luc Parodi, Olivier Duhamel, Jerome Jaffre, ‘Chronique de l’opinion publique’, in: Pouvoirs (quarterly) 19 (1981) to 36 (1986); G. Le Gail, ‘Sondages: l’etat de l’opinion’, RPP, 921, January-February 1986; J. Lecaillon and J.-D. Lafay, ‘La Popularite en politique: Bilan de cinq ans’, Commentaire, 33, Spring 1986. 3. For this paragraph in general see note 2 above. As well: for the FN see, G. Birenbaum, ‘Front National: les mutations d’un groupuscule’, and P. Perrineau, ‘Quel avenir pour le Front National. ?‘, Intervention, 15, January-FebruaryMarch 1986; P. Perrineau, ‘Le Front National: un electorat autoritaire’, R!!P, 918, JulyAugust 1985; Monica Charlot, ‘L’Emergence du Front National’, Revue FranGaise de Science Politique (RASP) XXXVI: 1, February 1986. For the respectable right: W. R. Schonfeld, ‘Le RPR et I’UDF a I’epreuve de l’opposition’, RFSP, op. cit.; ‘L’Opposition, est-elle credible ?‘, L ‘Express, 5 October 1984; ‘Les Francais regardent a droite’, Expansion, 21 February 1986; A. Duhamel, ‘16 mars: les attentes des francais’, L’Expess, 31 January 1986. For the declining credibility of conventional political parties, ‘Partis Politiques: la vague de reject’, .!z Point, 24 February 1986 and J. Charlot. ‘La Transformation de l’image des partis politiques francais, RFSP, op. cit. 4. On the 1984 European elections, see J. and M. Charlot. ‘France’, ElectoralStudies. 3:3. 1984; G. Le Gall, ‘Une Election sans enjeu, avec consequences’, and J.-L. Parodi, ‘Les cinqs absents de l’election europeenne’, RPP, 910, May-June 1984: A. Lancelot, ‘L’Eurosanction’, Projet, 188, September-October 1984. For the decline of the PCF, see J. Ranger, ‘Le De&n du Parti Communiste Francais, RFSP, op. cit. 5. For the 1985 cantonal election, see J.-L. Parodi, ‘La Repetition des Europkes’; G. Le Gall. ‘Une Election de confirmation’, and A. Lancelot, ‘L’lnsupportable majorite: les cantonales de mars 1985’, Projet, 193, May-June 1985. 6. On the 1985 change to PR, see, A. F. Knapp, ‘Orderly Retreat: Mitterrand Chooses PR’. Electoral Studies, 4:3, 1985; ‘Le nombre de deputes’, Populations et Sociktis, 199, February 1986; b Monde (dossiers and documents), ‘Les Modes de Scrutin en France’. 129. January 1986; Pouvoirs, ‘La Representation proportionnelle’, 32, 1985. 7. The tour dkisgis a theoretical construct aimed at showing the fundamental split of the vote. In double ballot elections it consists of the left-right division on the second round, plus the similar division on the first round in seats won outright at that stage. In 1986, of course, the sole ballot was also, by definition, the tour d&i$. 8. See ‘Special Mars 86’, a dossier on the elections edited by 0. Duhamel and E. Dupoirier. L ‘Express, 21-27 March 1986. 9. IFOPgave the 11 per cent figure. See L’Ezjenement du Jeudi, 20-26 March 1986. BVA gave 14 per cent, Libhation, 18 March 1986; SOFRES gave 17 per cent, see Duhamel and Dupoirier, op. cit. 10. Duhamel and Dupoirier, op. cit. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. By July 1986 the proportion of FN voters favouring Mitterrand had risen to 30 per cent, with 15 per cent still undecided. 13. G. Le Gall, ‘~Mars 1986: Des Elections de Transition ?‘, Revue Pohtique et Parlementaire, 922, March-April 1986. 14. Duhamel and Dupoirier, op. cit.
The French General Election of 16 March 1986 D
Lincoln College, Oxjord OX1 3DR, England R. W. JOHNSOS Mugdalen College, Oxford OX1 4AlJ, England
The French general election of 1986 is revealing on five counts. First it suggests that a change of electoral system has more effect on the allocation of seats than on voting behaviour-at least for the first election after the change. (That provides comfort for those academic specialists who discount the influence of electoral on party systems-and explains why professional politicians pay them no heed.) Second, it was the first French election since 1945 to combine two contests (regional and parliamentary) on the same day (on the regionals, see Sonia Mazey, ‘The Regional Elections’, pp. 297-301). Unlike the 1945 result (or the United States) there was little ticket splitting; national issues and patterns dominated both elections, confirming the nationalization of French politics. The third lesson of the parliamentary contest was to confirm the general evolution of electoral politics in the Fifth Republic towards the norm for most major western democracies: nationalization and homogenization of support for the major parties. as the old solid bastions of region, religion and class are eroded (but not demolished); the precipitous decline of Communist parties, a particular example of the generally reduced capacity of working class organizations and parties to mobilize their traditional supporters; a decline in turnout and the increasing importance of differential turnout; and the eruption of noneconomic issues in a period of economic difficulty-law and order, an anti-permissive backlash, race and immigration. However, (fourth) in France these issues have been most sucessfully exploited by a new (flash?) party of the extreme right, the National Front (FN), partly thanks to the introduction of proportional representation. The FN’s unexpected emergence over the past two years marks France from its neighbours-for the moment, at least. In 1986, the FN had a greater impact on the distribution of seats within the right, and thus on the situation of the new conservative government and of the new regional executives, than on the distribution of the vote between right and left. Its success in helping to deprive the respectable right-the Rally for the Republic (RPR) and the Union for French Democracy (UDF)-of an extensive parliamentary majority largely explains why President Mitterrand finally changed the electoral system to proportional representation (PR) for the 1986 election and why Prime IMinister Jacques Chirac has already changed it back again to the single member two-ballot majority system. Dr Goidey wishes to thank the Lincoln College Research Fund and the Oxford Board of the Faculty of Social Studies for helping him to go to France to study the elections. l
0261-3794/86/03/0229-241503.000 1986 Butterworth
& Co(Publishers)Ltd
230
The French General Election yi 16 March 19X6
Finally, the success of the FN at both national and regional level has added to and intensifed the internal tensions and rivalries within the right. while the decline of the Communists (PCF) and the amplification of Socialist party (PS) dominance of the left, have reduced conflict within that part of the political spectrum. These are not just academic considerations: a presidential election is due in the spring of 1988 and may come earlier; the 1986 general election was a dry run for that contest. traditionally the dominant one in the politics of the Fifth Republic. 1986 has confirmed the preponderance of the RPR on the right and the pre-eminence of the PS on the left. It may help move France from the bipolar four-party system of 1972-81 (and its present bipolar three major and two minor party distribution) towards something closer to a two party system with the extreme minor parties retaining only nuisance value.
From
1781 to 1986
The 1981 presidential and parliamentary elections which brought the left to power for the first time in a generation were somewhat prematurely hailed as a critical or realigning election. They were also greeted as a conversion of the French electorate to the most radical democratic socialist programme of any major west European country. A more prudent look at the results, however, confirmed neither hypothesis. Rather, a divided right n-as rejected after almost a quarter of a century in power; a discredited PCF punished for breaking the union of the left; and the victory of the PS achieved with the standard promises of sustained growth. reduced unemployment, and increased social benefits. These promises were to be fulfilled through the ‘other logic’ of planning, nationalization, state subsidies and investment to revive old industries. promote new ones and create jobs; and by improved social benefits and an increased minimum wage to stimulate consumption. The Socialist platform. however, owed more to the exigencies of the past alliance with the Communist party, the continuing need to capture its electorate, and to the internal balance within the PS itself. than to any very convincing economic analysis of the relation between the means and ends of the programme. l Mitterrand had won the 1981 elections thanks to the self-defeating tactics of the PCF which with the internecine conflicts within the right and the bickering between President Giscard d’Estaing and his former Prime Minister. Jacques Chirac, enabled him to gain pivotal centrist votes as well. These middle class, often Catholic voters were not particularly attracted by the redistributive planks in the PS platform, and their support rapidly ebbed away in the first two years of Socialist rule, as Mitterrand kept his redistributive promises and gave priority to anchoring into the PS the working class vote recently acquired from the PCF. As the ‘other logic’ proved incapable of sustaining, much less expanding. coal and steel production. French expansion sucked in imports. threatening the balance of payments and currency stability. Despite two devaluations in 1981 and 1982, the 1982 attempt to limit inflation and the budget deficit weakened employment more than it strengthened the franc. Disillusion spread from the liberal professions and business men to white and blue collar workers. A programme of reflationary growth was always likely-especially in the context of the international deflation of the early 1980s-to run hard into balance of payments constraints and currency depreciation. In March 1983, Mitterrand had to decide how to share out austerity. He chose further devaluation, and rising unemployment within the existing international economic framework, rather than continuing redistributive policies in a siege economy. For ignoring those in the Finance Ministry and the PM’s office who had urged he
D.AVIDB. GOLDEYAND R. W. JOHNSON
231
make the former choice from the spring of 198 1, he guaranteed that the adjustment of 1983 was all the harsher. Unemployment was further intensified by the belated decision to withdraw resources from the declining smokestack industries and concentrate them in the new sunrise sectors. As taxes and unemployment rose, the government’s popularity plummeted to an all time low, with too little time for the anticipated pre-election boomlet to work its magic’ (as may be seen from Table 1).
The Rise of the FN and Decline
of the PCF
The President’s acute unpopularity from the summer of 1983 to 1985, and the public’s sense of disillusion, drift and abandon, powerfully contributed to the popular fixation with law and order and immigration, and so to the rapid rise from nowhere of the FN, which battened on these issues and their careless exploitation by the RPR, and also served to express the right’s exasperation and frustration. The government’s record unpopularity thus did not help the RPR-UDF as much as they anticipated. Their own undistinguished record in office was too recent, their internal rivalries too evident. Instead, the FIN profited. Hard times, however, also improved the standing of former Prime Minister Raymond Barre, who had made something of a specialty of announcing unpleasant home truths. Sure of himself, disdainful of ex-President Giscard d’Estaing and his own predecessor at Matignon, Jacques Chirac, Barre was the most troublesome figure in the conservative camp and Mitterrand’s most dangerous potential challenger, although without a real party of his own.3 Mitterrand’s strategy from 1983 was to concentrate the necessary sacrifices into 18 months or two years, to give himself some leeway for the 1986 election. The institutions of the Fifth Republic gave him the security for such a strategy: the divisions of the opposition and the weakness of the PCF gave him some room for manceuvre. The PCF’s veiled criticisms of the government from within (and its departure from government in July 1984) could not prevent the party sharing in the general unpopularity of the left, so glaring were its own mistakes. Its apparently ineluctable decline allowed Mitterrand to hope to recoup some of the support lost since 198 1. Heir to the largest part of the PCF electorate. the PS might also hope to appeal again for centrist votes, for the weakness of the Communists precluded them from effectively attacking the PS from the left. TABLE 1. Disposable household 1985’
income/GDP:
Year
% change disposable income
1981
+ 2.8
1982 1983 1984 1985
+ 2.6 -0.7 -0.7 +1.0
1981-
% change GDP + + + + +
0.6 2.0 0.7 1.3 1.3
Adapted from ‘1981-1986: Bilan de la France’, L.e 1986. But from May 1981 to January 1986, the buying power of the minimum wage rose by 12.2%, and of the minimum old age pension by 25.2%. That of foremen, managerial staff, the liberal professions and the middle class (retired) fell, from 0.4% to 2.7% per year. l
Point, 17 February
232
The French
General Election oj 16 March
1986
Since neither PCF impotence nor labour peace could be assured in 1983 if the PCF left the government then. Mitterrand had to delay the effective appeal to the centre implied by his austerity policy. Instead. he maintained Pierre Mauroy as premier. thoroughly discredited everywhere except within the PS and PCF. Meanwhile, the general sense of malaise and drift emboldened not only the FN but all those with a grievance against government policy to resort to direct action: truckers, farmers. medical students and the professions. and finally the church school lobby. blauroy’s clumsy attempts to distract PS militants from the government’s broken economic promises with action against reactionary press baron Robert Hersant and subsidies for church schools. ultimately backfired. at the premier’s own expense. The nadir was reached with the June 1984 European election, fought in France by national lists: the PS lost almost half its 198 1 vote, the PCF fell back from 16 per cent to 11 per cent, while the FN came from nowhere also to 11 per cent, enough to keep the joint RPR-UDF list from winning a majority of the vote.” Mitterrand could now safely dispense with the PCF, and it was anxious for an excuse to leave government. The policy crisis over church schools was further undermining the government, mobilizing huge demonstrations against it and separating the PS from the centrist support it would need in 1986. On 12 July 1984, Mitterrand simply withdrew his schools bill. Mauroy resigned, and the President, free of the PCF incubus, appointed his loyal follower (and faithful hatchet man within the PS), Laurent Fabius, as Premier. As Minister of Industry from 1983, Fabius had been responsible for restructuring the nationalized sector-and thus for the decline of the old industries in which PCF strength had traditionally been concentrated. The party had refused to vote confidence in his industrial policy in April: in July. it was offered reduced representation in his government. But even the rump Communist electorate remained attached to the union of the left. The PCF thus simply declined to enter the new government in July: by September it claimed no longer to be part of the left majority but not yet in opposition to the PS; by the 25th party congress of February 1985, it was attacking the government more vigorously than the right-repeating its suicidal policy of 1978-8 1.
The Change
to PR
Having disposed of the schools issue, Mauroy, and the PCF. Mitterrand nas non- in a position to match his appeal to his policy. Prime IMinister Fabius set out to lower the political temperature by a systematic campaign of &crLrpation, and to steal the right’s advantage. The language of priorities ceased to be socialist and became consensual and technocratic: Fabius emphasized the productivity, competitiveness and profitability of the firm. and above all, modernization. Mitterrand had toyed. as had Giscard unsuccessfully before him. mith reviving a centre group that might rally its support for the benefit of the government. A change in the electoral system to PR was a necessary condition for the success of such a strategy; in the circumstances it was not a sufficient one as the failure of Socialist-inspired centrist lists in the European election had demonstrated. With 20 per cent of the vote itself, and a diminished PCF, the PS faced a defeat in 1986 as sweeping as its own victory in 1981. The old constituency boundaries of the single-member seats, largely unchanged since 1958, were unfavourable to the left; but on the basis of the 1984 result, no rejigging of these boundaries, no matter how skilfully gerrymandered, would prevent the RPR-UDF winning a substantial majority of seats-and forcing out President Mitterrand. PS party leaders and ministers saw PR as a certain way to return to parliament. since under a PR list system, the party would control the order of candidates on
D,ALID B. GOLDEY mo
R. W. JOLSON
233
the d@zrtemental lists. The same calculation made PR less attractive to the party’s minorities, and both CERES and the Rocardians opposed the change. They were joined by some powerful PS federations-like Pas-de-Calais-where the preponderance of the PS over the PCF enabled the former to win seats at the expense of the latter on the second ballot. With PR, the PCF would rescue its seats at the expense of the PS. The opposite, however, held true in the old red belt around Paris. Here the two-ballot system had allowed a still dominant PCF to profit from the rising PS vote on the run-o& PR in Seine-St-Denis and VaI de Mame would allow PS deputies to be returned at the expense of the PCF in the party’s historic heartland. But Mitterrand, never himself a partisan of PR (although it figured in his 1981 presidential platform), preferred a two-ballot system that squeezed the PCF and forced it to back a PS presidential candidate in exchange for PS votes to rescue the diminishing band of Communist deputies. The final decision was thus put off until closer to the election-a characteristic of previous changes of French electoral systems. The dkpartemental council (cantonal) elections of March 1985, confirmed the 1984 results, and forced a decision. The PCF seemed incapable of restoring its fortunes, while the FN sustained its impetus. The election showed that an enfeebled PCF hostile to the PS was less help to the PS on the second ballot, than a rising FN was likely to be to the right. Its newly mobilized voters generally rallied to RPR or UDF candidates on the run-off, even where the FN tried to stay in the race.> The two-ballot majority system was thus doomed, but the government was still tempted by a two-ballot proportional representation system, as used in the 1983 municipal elections, to keep the PCF in thrall to the PS. But the opprobrium risked by inventing a complicated PR system used in no other country outweighed the putative advantage to be gained from electoral engineering. The government thus finally opted for the basic electoral system of the Fourth Republic: the highest average (d’Hondt) list system with the dbpartemetzt as constituency. Deputies were not, however, allocated to d@zrtements strictly proportionately, partly in order to preserve a minimum of 2 deputies for the smallest dipartements; partly in order not to increase the size of the National Assembly too much; partly to discriminate against the opposition. Looking to find a ratio of population to deputy that would not reduce a dbpartement ‘s representation, the Ministry of the Interior discovered that at 108.000 per deputy only the city of Paris (with a declining population), Chirac’s fief, lost membersfrom 31 to 21.6 The new system had two other casualties. One was Giscard, whose book, Deu.r Franc&r sur Trois, calling for a return to PR, appeared shortly before the government gratified his wishes; he responded by denouncing the change he had so recently advocated. The other was Michel Rocard, Mitterrand’s unforgiven challenger for the PS presidential nomination in 1981, and the PS leader persistently most popular with the centrist floating vote. His followers in the PS risked being squeezed by central office in the allocation of winnable places on PS lists, while his own popularity was suffering from the competing appeal of Fabius. To preserve his own presidential prospects, he resigned from a government where he stood little chance of preferment in any case. His presidential strategy, however, was now too clearly predicated on the PS doing so badly in the coming general election, that he would be its only plausible saviour. Rocard’s departure did not, however, restore unanimity to the PS. Until his resignation, he was the chief threat to the ambitions of the Mitterrandist leadership of the PS. With Rocard gone, rivalries within the Mitterrandist ranks promptly resurfaced, as the smooth, ambitious and arrogantjeune premier, Laurent Fabius, monopolized centre stage. At stake in the first instance was the control of the campaign, with the succession to Mitterrand not
234
The French General Eleclion oj I6
hhch
1986
far in the background. Mitterrand. also apparently increasingly irritated by the pretensions of his dauphin, ambiguously decided the quarrel over the direction of the campaign in party secretary Lionel Jospin’s favour: he was left in charge of the party’s campaign, with Fabius free to try to appeal to centrist voters.
The Construction
of Party
Lists
After almost 30 years of the single member majority system, all parties found the construction of dipartemental lists a difficult operation, caught between the priorities of the centre, the power of local notables. and their own internal conflicts. PS headquarters set out to widen the party’s appeal-and reduce the possibility of small lists taking precious votes from it-by forcing dipartemental federations to accept interlopers at the top of their lists. For party headquarters, local considerations counted less than finding a safe berth for party leaders and ministers; balancing candidatures to reflect the weight of tendencies within the party (and the preponderance of the hlitterrandists in it); providing places for occasional Left Radical (MRG) allies, a centrist renegade, a PSU leader or a leading ex-Communist; or even in providing a few winnable positions for women. These worthy ends were pursued to the advantage of ministers and Mitterrandists and at the expense of the Rocardians, provoking dissident lists (Rocardian) in the west and against MRG-led lists in the south-west, although compensation was offered disappointed notables (as in other parties) on the regional lists. Party central offices ignored long records of faithful local service at their peril: no party quite resolved the dilemma. The PCF faced the same sort of problem, though for different reasons. Its animus against the PS alienated not only part of its electorate. but also full-time party organizers (permanents) and former ministers. Dissident federations were generally brought to heel and orthodox candidates imposed, as in Seine-St-Denis. at the price of kicking popular local figures upstairs on to the regional lists, or barring their candidacies altogether. It was striking how many dbpartemental lists were headed by little known permanents while local PCF notables confined to regional lists were to embarrass the party by running ahead of sectarian loyalists heading the legislative lists. The FN, on the other hand, used its newly established central control to welcome-in local notables who might bring some support with them, displacing as candidates loyal but rebarbative militants. The ancient and accomplished conservative opportunist, Edouard Frederic-DuPont thus took second place on the FN’s Paris list. behind its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The FN thus sacrificed loyalty to electoral appeal in its search for candidates, risking later indiscipline: the PCF made the opposite choice, courting further electoral decline. On the respectable right, pressure from business contributors, determined to see the Socialists out, and the clear unitary disposition of the conservative electorate. helped dissuade Raymond Barre from mounting his own lists except in isolated instances and helped constrain Chirac to agree to more joint RPR-UDF lists than he would have liked. Chirac had intended to displace local notables at the end of their useful careers or members not entirely loyal to him, and to run separate RPR lists wherever he could, to provide himself with a large, renovated and totally disciplined party to make him Prime Minister and then President. Instead, the threat that Barre-or the FN-might profit from the disappointment of well entrenched local men tied both the RPR and UDF to their sitting members and local worthies; their lists thus came to ‘resemble a Restoration, the court of Louis XVIII, replete with old powdered marquis. their wigs whitened with the passage of time, and with great local feudatories’, as Le Point acidly remarked. Chirac thus found he had competing priorities, and sacrificed his dream of a renewed party
D.AVID B. GOLDEY AXD
R. W. Jomso~
235
to his presidential ambitions, and the need to hobble his competitors. Together with G&card and his henchmen in the Republican Party, the largest, best organized component of the UDF, Chirac aimed to keep declared Barristes from winnable places on conservative lists wherever possible. However. well before the election, Chirac also sought to undermine Giscard’s uncertain hold over the Republicans (and within the UDF) by wooing the rising generation within Giscard’s own party. Chirac made a particular effort with the party’s general secretary, Francois Leotard, and its ideologues, Alain Madelin and Gerard Longuet, all three of whom had distinguished themselves by their unrestrained opposition to the PS and the President and by espousing an unrefined Reaganism. Chirac sought to help these young Turks consolidate their influence in the Republican Party at the expense of Giscard and Barre, as he had previously tried with the other components of the UDF, to colonize the Radicals, and (with less success) to court the Barriste Centre Democrats (CDS). The threat from the FN and the aim of squeezing Barre led Chirac to abandon his initial plan of dividing the right, counting on the record unpopularity of the PS to attenuate the bias of the highest average rule in favour of the big batallions. Separate RPR lists risked pushing the UDF further towards Barre and destroying Chirac’s carefully cultivated influence within the UDF and over its nominations. Separate RPR lists were also the more vulnerable to FN competition. The risks appeared greatest in the three-fifths of the d@rtements with five seats or less, where the electoral system was least proportional, the penalties for division greatest, and the desire of local conservative notables for unity the strongest. Separate RPR lists were also opposed by old Gaullist barons and regional bosses, like Olivier Guichard in the west and Jacques Chaban-Delmas in Aquitaine; they had no intention of sacrificing their local hegemony to Chirac’s presidential ambitions-particularly since they might later wish to rally to Barre. Finally, the pressure for joint lists won out in two-thirds of the dipartements (with some third of the seats). Joint RPR-UDF lists meant negotiations between competing allies, however. but the UDF was a loose confederation. not a unified party like the RPR. Jacques Toubon. Chirac’s loyal henchman at the head of the RPR, was tempted to require the UDF to resolve its internal conflicts itself; but that would risk the RPR losing its influence over the intra-UDF distribution of power to Barre and Giscard. Toubon therefore agreed to negotiate with the different components of the UDF: the ostensibly Giscardian Republicans, the Barriste CDS and the Radicals, characteristically divided but as beholden to Chirac as to any UDF leader. The negotiations successfully restricted the number of Barristes in winning positionsthough not without provoking a dissident list in Yvelines-but it also encouraged UDF leaders to resolve their internal rivalries at the expense of the RPR. The price Toubon paid for keeping Barristes out was the surrender of more places and better positions to UDF candidates on the joint lists than he had planned. Finally, the negotiations gave an opportunity to Robert Hersant, proprietor of Le Figaro, Le ProgrLr (Lyon) and a great chain of regional dailies to extract nominations for himself and his creatures-sometimes by backing a separate list, as with the UDF in Pas-de-Calais. All conservative leaders wanted Hersant’s support, locally and nationally. He wanted repeal of the recent Socialist legislation against press monopolies, and one-or more-of the state television channels that the right was promising to denationalize. Hersant also had the wherewithal to fund lists with his candidates. Joint RPR-UDF lists had the enthusiastic support of local and national business. Otherwise, local contributors put their money on the sitting member and his team; nationally, the big money was overwhelmingly on the RPR. Nor did the PS want for funds. In the dipartements, parties spent twice as much on their lists as their candidates together had spent in their individual constituencies in 198 1. The campaign was as expensive as it was uninteresting.
236
The French
Gene&
Election
OJ’ IO Alarch
IW(
The Campaign The government had prepared a modest election budget for 1985186. to inject a little disposable income without again undermining the franc (whose devaluation after the election was widely expected as in 1981). This balancing act was greatly assisted by the autumn decline in both the price of oil and the dollar. whose high rates in 198 1-84 had done so much to throw the government’s initial expansionary policy off course. These windfalls certainly helped the return of confidence. which in turn helped the government. Conscious that its own unpopularity was greater than any confidence in its opponents, the PS planned a campaign that would first remind the d&us de sociulisme of the unpalatability of the alternative; then play on the fundamental left/right cleavage, which was much more favourable to the left than the PSIRPR-UDF division. and which had the further advantage of attracting PCF voters to the PS while further marginalizing their party: and finally, remind voters of the popular achievements of the government, harking back to /a force tranquille of 1981, the legitimacy of the President. and the disinclination to suffer a constitutional crisis. The PS launched the first phase of its campaign in November 1985: switched to second gear in early January: and to third in early February. The opposition’s themes were perhaps less well-chosen. partly because the PS had taken over some of its best ground since 1984, and the Communists were no longer a plausible menace: but also because the right was divided, competing with itself in the large urban dipartements and torn by the conflicting presidential ambitions of its leaders. RPR posters featured Chirac, with the RPR national team or its local candidates, but all in shirt-sleeves. confidently advancing at a trot, hair and ties windblown. The RPR slogan. Vivement demain!, exhortatory and vacuous, vvell-illustrated the opposition’s electoral problems. Republican party posters featured Giscard in his regulation pullover, while the few Barristes were favoured with the solid photo of their leader. In the provinces, posters were notably less partisan. emphasizing popular notability-or presidential ambition. In Yvelines. Michel Rocard almost blotted out the PS. sharing the hoardings with photos of Barre. Where the RPR-UDF ran united, (usually sharing out the leadership of the legislative and regional lists) they campaigned together and photos of the two t&s de hte together dominated. Local PS posters, especially in the last fortnight before the poll, reflected its tactics. With a very large number of sitting members. often divided by faction, PS legislative and regional candidates campaigned in their own constituencies rather than dipartement-wide. as the best way of getting out the PS vote. Little lists generally lacked money and made little impact in the national, though rather more in the regional, campaign. An exception was former presidential candidate i\!arie-France Garaud. Barre’s Paris submarine against Chirac, who was well-financed-to begin with. The PCF and FN also ran personalized campaigns, the FN around its leader. the PCF around its sitting members and local personalities. The FIN did not appear to want for militants or money. PCF posters, once early, omnipresent and explicitly partisan. were late, sparse. often totally lacking in partisan identification, and sometimes even printed on green paper, the ecologists’ corour. There were few PCF posters-or canvassers-in central Paris (except near the offices of I’Hz~manitQ In the suburbs. once solidly Communist, PCF posters in several dbpartements, including hlarchais’ Val de Mame, showed pictures of local PCF notables, with slogans like, ‘renew your confidence in your elected representative’, or ‘Fidelity! ‘, with no indication of party affiliation. Popular local leaders who disagreed with the party line and had been rewarded with non-electable places on legislative. or the top of regional, lists, were peculiarly prominent on the hoardings. Canvassing. once at saturation level, was now patchy at best.
DAVID B. GOLDEY
AND
R. W. JOH,YSOK
237
The PCF’s modest aim was not to fall below 10 per cent and to inoculate its remaining voters against the temptation to vote for the PS in the coming presidential election. The party effectively wrote off half the dtpartements, preferring not to exhaust its Limited resources in mobilizing its few remaining voters where it was anyway too weak to win, and where its supporters would probably end by voting PS. Where the PCF was stronger, either electorally and organizationally as around Paris, or with a substantial number of local councillors, mayors and deputies, as in large provincial cities like Le Mans or Le Havre or the south, the PCF set out first to mobilize and discipline its militants and d/us. The two aims were not always compatible, and the former tended to be sacrificed to the latter-old Stalinist organizers emerging from retirement to displace the numerous critics of the party fine. As in other parties, there was difficulty where only the head of the list might hope to be elected; disappointed deputies were sometimes supported by PCF local government ilus, at odds with party policy and fearful for their seats should the electoral alliance with the PS be definitively torpedoed. These tensions surfaced most obviously in the Paris suburbs, in the neighbouring PCF strongholds of Vai de Marne and Seine-St-Denis. The former was the traditiona stronghold of the party’s leaders, and of Marchais’ apparent successor, Jean-Claude Gayssot; the latter was the strongest Communist dttpartement, whose leaders had been openly critical of the national line since 1985. Gayssot was despatched next door to head the list in Seine-StDenis and bring dissidents to heel, together with.party workers from Val de Marne. The French Politbureau did not trust Seine-St-Denis militants who had seen their popular federal secretary kicked upstairs to head the PCF’s regional list for criticizing the party line. There was little comradeship or even contact between the two groups of party workers in the campaign. Putting orthodoxy before efficacy, the PCF leadership was unable altogether to achieve even its limited aim: to mobilize those certain to vote for the PCF, but not floaters who might then drift to the PS. There was just enough manpower, where PCF organization still had substance, to mobilize the faithful, through regular canvassing over six months; but only after the party had changed its line in mid-stream (as it had had to do in 19Si) from concentrating its fire on the PS to explaining that its first priority was to beat the right, and (disingenuously) that the best way to achieve that was to vote Communist.
Divisions
on the Right
The FN also had to overcome a credibility gap: it had to distinguish itself from the respectable right without appearing too extreme or to be helping the left. Le Pen accomplished this with his usual aplomb, arguing that ‘we say out loud what you think to yourself’. The FN held a series of enthusiastic and well-attended Paris meetings. appealing to Vichyite, aighie fraqak, and anti-socialist and anti-immigrant sentiment, the latter themes being much the most deeply feft. The social issue was often a problem for the respectable right: in the provinces, away from the problems of immigration, racial conflict, urban decay and delinquency, opposition deputies opposed to the death penalty were pursued at public meetings by elderly voters obsessed by the notion that the return of the death penalty and forced’labour would reduce criminality, restore order and somehow, perhaps. the settled village society of their chil~o~. The respectable right could not easily follow down this road without offending the principles of its Gaullist and Catholic components and losing part of the centrist electorate. Its campaign was further bedevilled by the competing presidential ambitions of its leaders. Voters were concerned with the standard of living, unemployment and law and order. The
2%
The French
Gene&
ElectIon of 16 MmA
1986
RPR and UDF had laboriously constructed a joint programme. in which much water had been put in their free market. anti-immigrant. wine, and which was predicated on the possibility of a conservative government carrying out the programme under a Socialist President-partly because both Chirac and Giscard needed office to re-establish themselves as credible presidential candidates. Barre, ahead in the opinion polls. and most likely to profit from an early presidential election. rejected the programme as economically unrealistic and incapable of application while hlitterrand remained president. Giscard sought to gain public credit and attention at Chirac’s expense and to provoke the relationship of President and Prime Barre, by concentrating on ‘cohabitation’, hlinister where the latter spoke for an Assembly majority hostile to the President. Giscard claimed this would leave the President impotent: Mitterrand contradicted him. to envenom the debate on the right. Giscard further successfully provoked Barre by inviting him to a public show of support for a programme he rejected. Barre’s intemperate reaction sapped his own credibility on the right, less to the advantage of Giscard but more to the disadvantage of the right as a whole: Giscard’s manceuvres undid the limited coherence of the conservative campaign and hindered its momentum.
Alarms
and Excursions
PS mistakes cost it time more than support. At its autumn Toulouse Congress. Michel Rocard returned with 28 per cent of the delegates, back to his 1979 level in the party. That helped the Rocardians to more places on regional (but not legislative) lists and it helped Jospin move the party away from red-blooded Socialist rhetoric to the modernizing, consensual position of Premier Fabius, the star of the Congress. But Fabius was both prone to temporize and over-confident. First, there was the ‘Greenpeace’ affair, which broke in September. French agents had sabotaged a Friends of the Earth boat in New Zealand intended to disrupt French atomic tests in the south Pacific. French opinion was unmoved by the loss of a life caused by this modest act of international terrorism in the territory of a friendly power; but the government was discredited by its apparent incapacity to control its own secret services, or to cover up more effectively. Mitterrand’s old crony. Minister of Defence Charles Hernu, finally had to carry the can and was forced to resign. Fabius’ most obvious own goal. however. was his November television debate with Jacques Chirac. Fabius counted on heckling Chirac until the RPR leader lost his cool. But Chirac kept his head, and instead the Prime Minister damaged his reputation as a moderate and reasonable man. With Rocard largely absent from television (apparently by mutual agreement with the party) the PS campaign was suddenly left leaderless-until the President stepped in. Mitterrand would almost certainly have intervened in any case. The PS was gaining in the polls from the autumn, so that he could safely expect to claim its continuing rise for himself, reinforcing his position against the right. If the majority against him in the Assembly was large and solid, his position would be intolerable and he would be forced out. Simulations showed that with the new electoral system some 43 per cent of the vote was needed for a clear parliamentary majority. If the FIN took 10 per cent from the right. and the PCF held 10 per cent, then the PS needed to inch over 30 per cent and the RPR-UDF would have only a small majority on their own-or none at all. Fabius’ TV disaster therefore probably did not dictate Mitterrand’s entry into the campaign, but rather its timing. This was both indirect and overt. Leaks from the Elysee contradicted Giscard’s version of cohabitation and kept that issue, which divided the right. alive. There were also two big public meetings, in December and February. in the constituencies of his two prime ministers, Fabius and Mauroy; and two long television
DAVID B. GOLDEY AND R. W. JOHNSON
239
interviews, one early on, the other just before the opening of the official fortnight-long broadcasting campaign. Mitterrand carefully confined his meetings and television appearances to the period before the official campaign period-unlike de Gaulle, Pompidou or Giscard-so the right could less plausibly attack him for taking part in the campaign. His interventions were well-judged and successful. As the last week of the campaign opened-when opinion polls may no longer be published-the result seemed very much in the balance (as Table 2 shows) perhaps to be decided as voters went to the polls. Leaks from the Elysee, repeating Mitterrand’s threats to resign if the right returned with a big majority and pressed him too hard had to compete with news that Muslim fundamentalists in Beirut had taken French hostages, killing one of them. Mitterrand was out to squeeze the PCF, mobilize the hesitant, and cross-pressure the timorous floating voter. The kidnapping added to the uncertainty, but probably buttressed presidential legitimacy rather than sapping it (as, over time, it had done to President Carter). It probably also confirmed those hostile to Arab immigrants in their intention to vote for the FN. Certainly, Chirac’s repeated appeal for a useful right vote for the RPR-UDF at his last big eve of poll Paris meeting, suggested that the RPR’s late private polls were showing the FN doing better than the 7 to 8 per cent credited it in the last published surveys. The opinion surveys, in fact, underestimated the FN and PS votes; and over-estimated support for the RPR-UDF and the PCF. The initial comment on the election was less in response to the actual vote, than a reaction to the expectations created by the polls themselves.
The Pattern
of Candidacies
In effect the elections were fought by four, or perhaps four and a half large parties (for the RPR and UDF ran joint lists in two-thirds of the metropolitan d$uzrtements). The change to PR had little impact on an electorate so thoroughly used to thinking in the old ways that over 93 per cent of the vote was cast for the major parties (RPR, UDF, PS, PCF, FN). The ‘little lists’, which might have been expected to flourish under PR, had signally little success. The pattern of candidacies reflected the heavily national nature of the campaign, with the big parties present everywhere (a lonely exception was the FN’s withdrawal of its candidate in Southern Corsica in a vain attempt to secure the election of a friendly UDF). The list system enabled the parties to attempt to buy-in all manner of minority tendencies, ranging from the thirteen members of the press baron, Robert Hersant’s, entourage present on various UDF and RPR lists to the PS’s adoption of the dissident Communist, Henri Fiszbin, in Alpes-Maritimes; its vain attempt to impose Michel Baylet, honorary president of the MRG (and government minister) in Tam-et-Garonne; and its more successful attempt to impose the renegade ex-UDF, Olivier Stirn, in Manche. Inevitably, a great deal of attention centred on Barre’s successful campaign in favour of his own candidate, Christine Boutin, against the official UDF list in Yvelines, and on the extent of his support for Marie-France Garaud in Paris in an apparent attempt to shave valuable votes away from Chirac. Barre came to Paris and campaigned both for the official UDF list-and Mme Garaud. There seemed little doubt that Mme Garaud’s remarkably well financed campaign (Barre’s own treasurer was second on the Garaud list) represented a vain attempt to give Chirac some of the same problems in Paris that the RPR’s Michel Noir was (far more successfully) giving Barre in Lyon. The real contest on the right, however, was the contest between UDF (or surrogates) and the RPR in 35 dijartements. While lip service was paid to right unity and stress laid on the joint UDF-RPR lists in the other 61 d+urtements, the fact was that the 35 included all the large dbpartements, so that the UDF and RPR were in competition for more than half the
The French
240 TABLE 2.
The evolution of opinion, October
Poll Date of sample Month published Extreme left PCF PS Other left Total left Ecologist RPR-UDF Other right FN Total right
General Election of 16 ,Clarcb 19SG
1985-March 1986 (as a percentage of those expressing a voting intention)’
SOFRES
SOFRES
IFOP
SOFRES
WA
IFOP
Oct.
Nov.
Nov.
Dec.
Dec.
Jan.
2 10 23
2 10 22
1 10 26
3:
3: 4
2 11 ‘7 1 41
1 10.5 26.5 3 41
1.5 11 28 1 41.5
2
3 48.5 1
3 45 5.5 8.5 59
4
3: 4
43
45
43
; 60
: 55
9” 58
44 4.5 8.5 57
5t.5
Adapted from G. Le Gall, ‘Sondages: l’etat de l’opinion’. Revue Politigue et Padementaire, 921, January- February 1986 and Libe’rution, 14 March 1986. SOFRES polls originally in Le Figaro. fFOP in Le Point, BVA in Paris-Match. l
seats at stake. (Though in the Gironde, with 11 seats at stake, the UDF thought better of trying to challenge Chaban-Delmas in his fief, preferring to accept humiliatingly poor terms for a joint list.) There were also a number of RPR-UDF fights in small dpartements due to irreconcilable local rivalries. In the end these divisions within the right were to play a crucial role. The heavy weighting given to large or united lists by the highest average rule meant that the UDF and RPR thereby sacrificed just enough seats to ensure that they did not, on their own, have an overall parliamentary majority. The benefits went notably to the left: in general the FN did well enough to earn their seats whatever the RPR and UDF did. Competition between the RPR and UDF did not appear to deprive the FN of any support, any more than primaries under the old system in 1973-8 had increased the potential right wing vote. The PCF frequently owed seats to the division of the right. but the PS-as the largest party the inevitable beneficiary of the highest average system-benefited most from the divisions of its opponents. Overall, the main effect of PR was undoubtedly to maintain the left’s strength at an otherwise unhoped-for level. The PCF, with 9.7 per cent of the vote and only 5.8 per cent of the seats, complained bitterly about the unfairness of the highest average rule: but the truth was that without PR the party’s representation would have been virtually wiped out. The FN had been born of PR (in the 1984 European elections): in 1986, with 9.8 per cent of the vote and 6.3 per cent of the seats, it knew better than to complain. The UDF and RPR took 48.8 per cent of the seats with their 42 per cent of the vote--about the same advantage as the PS’s 37.1 per cent of the seats from 31.6 per cent of the vote. But the left had totalled only 44 per cent of the vote. Under a majority system there is little doubt that this would have guaranteed a majority for the right equivalent to the left majority in 1981-especially given the likelihood of FN votes collapsing to the orthodox Right on a second ballot and the tremendous barriers against PS-PCF co-operation in 1986 (calculations based on the old assumption of second ballot). Left unity under a majority system could only mask the extent to which PR, in the very different political circumstances of 1986, had saved the PS-and thus the President-from a major rout. Although the elections had been long anticipated as a dramatic show-down, turnout was
DAVID B. GOLD&Y xm
R. W. JOHNSO~V
241
TABLE 2 (cont’d).
SOFRES
BVA
LFOP 27 Jan.1 Feb. Feb.
BVA 15-20 Jan. Feb.
SOFRES 25-30 Jan. Feb.
IFOP 17-22 Feb. Mar.
BVA 28 Feb.2 Mar. Maf.
SOFRES 28 Feb.4 Mar. Mar.
2
2 11 26.5 1.5 41 45
1.5 10.5 27.5 2.5 42 3.5 45 2
1.5 11 30 1.5 44 2 45 2.5 6.5 54
3 10.5 28 1.5 43 1.5 44 3.5 8 55.5
Jan.
Jan.
1.5
1.5 40 3
2 10.5 27 2.5 42 1.5
::.5 1.5 42 3
2.5 10.5 28.5 1 42.5 2
44 4
45 4
46 2
47 2
9 57
7.5 56.5
7 55
6.5 55.5
2
3.5 8.5 57
5:::
Result
% vote 16 Mar. ~ _ 1.5 9.7 31.6 1.2 44 1.2 42 2.9 9.9 54.8
surprisingly low: of legislative elections in the Fifth Republic only 1962 and 1981 had seen fewer people vote. In part this was a reflection of the change in the electoral system which left some confused and which did away with the often highly-charged battles in singlemember seats; and no doubt disillusion with party politics and the tedium of the campaign counted for something too. But there was no doubt that differential abstention. which had cost the right so dear in 1981, now cost the left around 2 per cent of the vote. with the Communists suffering most. Not only were traditional left voters disgusted that the first left government in a generation had actually increased unemployment, but the dramatic erosion of the PCF machine simply made it far harder to pull out the alsvays marginal voters at the bottom of the social heap. Nearly one and a quarter million people spoilt their ballots: more, both in absolute and percentage terms than in any election since modern records were kept. To some extent disillusion, tedium and a protest against the system of blocked party lists may account for this, but the new electoral system and the fact that regional elections were held on the same day left many voters hopelessly confused. (Spoilt ballots were even higher in the regionals and the rate was highest of all in small rural dipartements.) The left, with its greater reliance on poorer and less educated voters, seems likely to have suffered most. For. as Table 4 shows, the respectable right, even with the added force of the FN, succeeded in mobilizing a smaller pro~rtion of the registered electorate than in 1974 or 1978 at the toff~dec~s~’ the real difference lay in the left’s even poorer mobilization.
The Right The UDF and RPR, who had looked forward to a massive triumph in 1986, thus did not fare pa~icu~ar~y well: in their dreadful year of 1981 they had taken 40.07 per cent of the vote between them; at the 1984 European election this had risen to 43.02 per cent: now they were down to 42.03 per cent. Five years of ferocious- and often feverish-propaganda against the left had, in the end, worked almost exclusively to the benefit of the FN. There was certainly no note of triumph on the right as it became clear that a parliamentary
The French Genera! Efection of 16 March I 9%
242
TABLE 3. French legislative elections,
Ext. Register
1973 1978 1981 1986
1973 1978 1981 1986
29.9 34.4 35.5 36.6
Abst.
left
Votes 5.6 6.1 10.4 9.1
Comm.
1973-86
(Metropolitan
Socialist and other left
Gaullist
France only) cons. centrist
Ext. right
(millions) at tirst or, in 1986, sole ballot 4.5 6.7 5.6’ 0.76 5.1 7.3 6.45 7.4 0.95 5.9 ;:; 5.2 5.4 0.33 4.0 11.2’ 0.42 2.7
Votes (%) 3.3 3.33 1.33 1.5
0.7 0.9 0.09 2.76”
at first or, in 1986, sole ballot 22.0 23.9 26.5 21.4 25.8 22.35 25.0 20.6 38.3 20.9 21.8 16.1 32.8 42.03s 9.69
2.8 0.9 0.4 9.87
Seats Other right 1973 1978 1981 1986
73 86 43 32
102 112 282 211
176 144 83 140
122 132 66 126
115 35
Total 473 474 474 555
1. Since some Centrists and Giscardians stood without Gauflist opposition but others ran in ‘primaries’ against Gaullists, this figure somewhat exaggerates their strength at the expense of the Gaullists. 2. 3.14m. for separate RPR lists; 2.33m. for separate UDF lists; and 602m. for joint UDF-RPR lists. 3. 11.5 % for RPR alone; 9.53% for UDF alone; 21% for UDF-RPR joint lists. 4. Includes 20,876 votes (0.07%) for dissident FN lists. 5. Elected against official RP~UDF lists but often dissident RPRs or UDFs in practice who tended to rejoin their former parties once in Parliament.
majority would depend on a small handful of potentially fickle right wing independents and on the results in the 22 overseas seats. There was a general tendency to blame Barre for the bad result and certainly his divisive tactics had not helped; but the right had probably also hurt itself by giving in to the pressures of its old notables instead of bringing on a new generation of candidates, and by its dull and disunited campaign. The various formations of the respectable right had, in fact, done little more than retain the same old electorate which is, at both local and national level, legitimist in outlook, voting RPR or UDF almost indifferently, depending on which party was already best esconced in their d~pa~t~~e~t. Thus, as Table 5 shows, most UDF-RPR contests were won by large margins by the already sitting party. There were particular grimaces within the RPR, whose lead in seats over the UDF was nothing like so substantial as had been hoped, and because the right’s tiny overall parliamentary majority was a fragile base from which to confront the President. There were even occasional mutterings that Chirac and To&on had not made a very good fist of the negotiations with the UDF. In fact it was not clear that the RPR could have done much better; the general pressure for united right lists had been too strong to buck. Although the RPR did beat the UDF in 22 of the 35 dbpartements where they competed, this was almost wholly a reflection of the enormous political impact of Chirac’s control of Paris and Gaullist implantation in the region. In the capital and the seven surrounding dipartements of the
DAVID B. GOLDEYAND R. W. JOHNSON
243
TABLE 4. The tour dtkis$, 1974-86 (% of registered electorate)
Legislative Presidential Legislative Presidential Legislative Legislative
1973 1974 1978 1981 198 1 1986
Left
Right
35.9 42.8 40.1 43.8 40.1 33.1
37.0 43.9 42.1 40.1 32.2 41.0’
* Including FN. RPR, UDF and other right alone= 33.5%.
he-de-France, the RPR trounced the UDF in every case, winning by better than 2 to 1 in both seats and votes. The other 27 intra-Right contests in the rest of France were far more even, the RPR winning 13, the UDF 14. By far the most dramatic results came in Bouchesdu-Rhone (the Marseille region) where the RPR utterly collapsed, to the benefit of the FN and UDF, the Gaullist list taking only 9.47 per cent of the vote, thus losing almost half the votes won by Chirac, DebrC and Garaud in 1981. In Rh6ne (the Lyon region) Barre’s anticipated triumph went sour, providing the most sensational single result of the whole election. Not only did Charles Hernu, the ‘patriotic’ anti-hero of the Greenpeace affair easily fulfil his long-odds boast of running far ahead of Barre, but the former premier only just scraped in ahead of the RPR list led by the energeticjeune loup, Michel Noir-who was immediately rewarded with a Cabinet .position by a grateful and clearly delighted Chirac. TABLE 5. Margins of victory (RPR over UDF, UDF over RPR) in 35 dbpartements with competing UDF and RPR lists, 1986 (% vote) l Lead Over 10% 5-10% Under 5%
RPR ahead 14 .:
UDF ahead Total 8 3 1
22 8 5
* Source: A. Lancelot, ‘Le briselame: les elections du 16 mars 1986’, Projet, 199, May- June 1986.
Barre’s setback-with its implications for the next presidential election-was undoubtedly caused by the way in which he chose to play presidential politics in a legislative campaign. Barre’s studied critique of cohabitation made sense as an attempt to destabilize Chirac’s presidential hopes, but it upset conservative voters anxious only for right wing unity in 1986. Similarly, Barre’s initiation of a local pact with all the other major party candidates whereby they agreed to avoid mention of racist themes was a wise move in its presenation of Barre’s centrist presidential image. But it had the effect of leaving a free run for the FN which, revelling in the fact, shaved large numbers of votes from Barre’s total, to the angry frustration of Barre’s local advisers who had endlessly warned him of the risks he was running, to no avail. For the UDF the most threatening fact of all was that the RPR had actually run ahead of Barre in the city of Lyon itself, thus threatening its municipal control of
244
The French General Election of 16 March 1986
France’s second city. With Paris already irrecoverably in Chirac’s hands. the UDF-and Barre--cannot afford to lose Lyon. But. unless Barre wins the 1988 presidential election, this now seems distinctively likely in 1989. The relatively poor UDF-RPR performance-in 33 of the 96 metropolitan d@arlemeats they actually polled a smaller percentage of the vote than in 1981-was due partly to a nationalization of the vote, with the orthodox right, like the PS. doing best in its weakest seats, less well in its redoubts; and partly to the simple fact of PS success. But most of all, of course, it was due to the success of the FN.
The National
Front
The FN had seen its vote fall back in percentage terms from its 1984 levels-but by nothing like as much as the polls had forecast, and in absolute terms it had won an extra half a million votes. Perhaps even more important symbolically was the fact that in metropolitan France itself (though not overall when the overseas votes were added in) the FN had overtaken the PCF. Not only did the FN run ahead of the PCF in 49 out of 96 dipartements, but it did so in all the large cities, even surpassing the PCF in a majority of the major towns in Seine-StDenis, once the reddest of red dipartements. This performance naturally gave further life to the old argument that the FIN was simply stealing large numbers of votes from the extreme left and transferring them to the extreme right, but this remained largely untrue. At the most, defecting left voters made up one-fifth of the FN vote (such transfers were greatest in the south), and ex-Socialists were far more likely to behave thus than ex-Communists. Overwhelmingly the FN’s votes were taken from the UDF and (especially) the RPR. None the less, the FN’s vote changed noticeably since 1984, moving further away from the classic profile of a right wing party. In 1984 the FN had done notably well among the upper middle classes and practising Catholics, but by 1986 the bishops’ anti-racist counter-offensive and the more mundane pressures of the vote utile squeezed the FN’s vote among these groups. This produced heavy falls in the FN vote in many comfortable quurtiers but particularly in the Paris region: although the FN still elected ten of its deputies there almost half of all the FN’s national losses were suffered in this region alone. Overall, only 66 per cent of those who had voted for the FN in 1984 did so again in 1986, 30 per cent returning to the RPR and UDF, 4 per cent elsewhere.8 But the FN almost wholly compensated for these losses by making further gains. largely among voters in the lower social classes. The FIN did notably well among men (who made up 63 per cent of its electorate), among the young (11 per cent of new voters supported it). and among the unemployed (different exit polls showed 11 per cent, 14 per cent, and 17 per cent of the jobless supporting the FN)9 what was not in doubt was that the FIN had increased its support in this group-SOFRES showed 12 per cent of the unemployed as FIN voters in 1984, 17 per cent in 1986. to The young, the male and the unemployed are all traditionally left wing groups in France and it was the addition of such groups to its otherwise cross-class support which gave the 1986 FN electorate its distinctively more ‘popular’ flavour. The fact that so few FN voters claim to have defected from the left does not sit easily with the fact of FN strength among such traditionally left wing groups. Part of the answer lies in the simple reluctance of those who now follow Le Pen to admit that not long ago they were supporting Mitterrand or Marchais. More significant is the fact that the FN is recruiting successfully among the working class and unemployed young. While 11 per cent of all new voters supported the FN, only 2 per cent of (middle class) students said that the FN was the party they felt closest to: so to achieve its overall 11 per cent figure the FN must have done particularly well among the lower class young. Strikingly, while only 7 per cent of young
DAVIDB.GOLDEY.AXD
R. W.JOHNSON
245
women aged 18-20 voted FN, 15 per cent of their male peers did so. *1 This is exactly the group that would formerly have voted PCF. In other words, the FN stole a good portion of the PCF’s potential electorate before it had formed any effective partisan attachment. It is not so much that the FIN stole votes that the PCF had, rather that it took votes the PCF ‘ought’ to have had. These young working class or unemployed men-much in evidence in leather jackets at FN meetings, where they mix incongruously with the 50 to 64 year olds (the age group amongst which the FN gets its best score of all)-are one of the most volatile and potentially decisive sections of the electorate. Typically, they are the first victims of economic austerity. Brought up in a somewhat left wing environment, but utterly disenchanted with what left rute has brought, they are an easy catch for the racist excitements of Le Pen rallies. Indifferent to appeals for a vote utile and certainly not for the RPR-UDF-seen as the old gang who exude the privileged aroma of the chateau, a world away from the squalid realities of life in the big city banlieu, they resemble the Wallace voters of 1968, disillusioned with the Democrats but not ready to vote Republican. Such young men are often only semi-educated. They have inhaled Le Pen’s slogans along with the normal teen culture. They don’t like immigrants and-often thanks to the FN-they know that Fabius, Badinter, Veil, Stasi and Fiterman are all Jews who seem always to favour the liberal causes and the immigrants they have been exhorted to hate. They are an undeniably dangerous and unstable group but they are probably not yet irrecoverably won for any cause, If the left is to win the next presidential election it will have to make this group one of its key targets. Even at the moment of casting their 1986 vote FN supporters said they would split only 72-11 per cent for Chirac against Mitterrand in a presidential contest, with 17 per cent undecided. l2 With Le Pen having decided that his movement is far more likely to prosper under continued left rule and that he will not, in any event, support an orthodox right wing candidate on a presidential second ballot, the future political behaviour of the FN voters of 1986 is by no means a certain quantity. For the moment, though, 1986 saw the FN consolidate its position right along the southern littoral, frequentIy increasing its 1984 score. Its most dramatic success came in Marseille where it increased its 1984 vote by 71,000 and emerged as the leading party of the Right-as it did throughout the Bouches-du-Rh6ne dbpartement. But the FN also ran ahead of the RPR in Gard and Var, and ahead of the UDF in Seine-et-Marne, Seine-St-Denis, Aveyron and Herault. With the return of the single member two ballot system it now seems likely that in all these areas the FN will be one of the two contestants in any conservative ‘primary’, squeezing one or other of the two mainstream conservative parties out of the game (though probably more to the advantage of the remaining big right party than to itself). Undoubtedly the FN would have emerged as one of the leading parties of the right in many other dipartements as well but for the prevalence of united UDF-RPR lists. Any large-scale return to UDF v. RPR ‘primaries’ in a two ballot system will thus pose some delicate problems for the conventional right, if only in the shape of the necessary auction for pivotal FN votes at the second ballot. This will be important almost everywhere, at least at the next general election, for the FN too witnessed a nationalizing effect in 1986, frequently making useful inroads in its weaker areas such as the Nord, Pas-de-Calais, and the Moselle valley. The Communist
Collapse
If the FN’s showing was one of the major dramas of the election, the continued collapse of the PCF was certainly the other. The dead weight of the leadership’s suicidal line was eloquently attested to by the way that dissident but popular Communist mayors frequently
246
The French
General Election of 16 h4arch 1986
ran ahead of the PCF’s legislative score in the regional contests. The vote utile motive undoubtedly explained a large number of defections to the PS, but with both the PCF and PS losing votes compared with 1981 it was evident that a large number of PCF votes were lost to the left altogether: a study of PCF bureaux de vote in Paris showed, too, that many more had retreated into embittered abstention. Even more disastrous for the PCF was the way in which the young turned against it erz masse. As a parti passoire it has always had to live with a high level of defection among the older age groups, losses which it generally made good by large-scale recruitment of the young. Thus. for example, in 1978 the PCF took 20.5 per cent of the total vote but won the support of 28 per cent of the 18 to 24 age group. In 1981 the comparable figures were 16 per cent and 18 per cent: in 1986 they were 9.7 per cent and 8 per cent-that is the PCF was now doing worse amongst the young than amongst all others.13 Even children of PCF permanents are defecting from the party now and real drames familiales beset many traditional PCF households. One result is that the PCF increasingly resembles the SF10 of the Fourth Republic-an overwhelmingly male party, dangerously over-dependent on an ageing and diminishing Resistance generation in its few areas of remaining influence. The PCF is being peeled like an onion, with its peripheral layers being remorselessly shed: women, white collar workers, the young and all voters in areas of previous PCF weakness. But while it is statistically true that the PCF is falling back ever more upon its bastions, it is now an exaggeration to speak of anywhere as a PCF bastion. In Seine-St-Denis, where as recently as 1978 the PCF took every seat in the dkpartement, in 1986 it could manage only 3 out of 13. In Paris, once a PCF stronghold, the Party failed to win a single seat. As Table 6 shows, 1986 was merely the latest dramatic chapter in a long history of decline. Even more threatening to the PCF is the fact that it ran ahead of the PS in only one (rural) dipartement (Cher), and that in the 52 towns of over 30,000 population with PCF mayors, the PCF ran ahead of the PS in only 19 in 1986. Such figures imply the virtual annihilation of the PCF at any future two-ballot parliamentary election, and the decimation of its once substantial municipal strength-which is crucial to what remains of the Party’s organization. The real question now is simply whether the PCF can survive for very much longer at all as an independent force in French politics, even if it retains some industrial strength. In 1986 it was only the divisions between the UDF and RPR which allowed it to win the 30 seats required to constitute a parliamentary group. With the present Party leadership still apparently set on going down with the ship rather than relinquish control, even a major split TABLE 6. PCF vote by dipartement
in legislative
elections, 1967-86’
Under 5% 5-10% lo-15% 15-20% 20-25% 25-30% 30-35% Over 35%
1967
1973
1978
1981
1986
0 6 17 21 21 18 9 3
0 10 13 28 23 12 9 1
15 27 20 17 7 1
25 17 13 9 2 1
26 ! 0 0 0
* Source: G. Le Gall, ‘Mars 1986: Des Elections de Transition?‘, Revue Politique et Parlementuire, 922, March-April 1986.
DAVID B. GOLDEY AND R.
W. JOHNSOX
247
in the PS might not be enough to save the PCF. Its only remaining trump is its control of the CGT trade union-which continues to lose members because of its Communist links.
The Socialist
Party
As against this, the PS emerged so powerfully-the biggest party in France with almost onethird of the vote-that its leaders behaved as if the result was a triumph, not a defeat. In some cases triumph it was: in Seine-Maritime and Belfort, Fabius and Chevenement respectively, actually increased the PS vote over its 1981 high-water mark, while Jospin in Paris and Lang in Loir-et-Cher came close to equalling the 1981 PS vote. The PS wave was particularly strong in the Paris region where, in one formerly red d+artenent after another, the PS surged effortlessly past the PCF. There is indeed no red belt left: in the seven dcipartements of the Paris banlieu the PS took 26 seats to the PCF’s 10 (the RPR taking 22, the UDF 12 and the FN 8). Elsewhere the general pattern of the PS vote was for the steepest fails to take place in its old redoubts, with the best performances coming where it had been weaker. This is, of course, a textbook definition of what the nationalization of political behaviour means. None the less, the PS had lost about one-sixth of its 1981 vote and, compared with 1981, it had lost support in every socioeconomic category. But among two groups-the 50 to 64 age group and the classic petite-bourgeoisie (shopkeepers, artisans, etc.) it lost almost half its 198 I share of the vote. In general the PS, more than any other French party, now best fulfils the classic inter-class profile of the catch-all party, but with a strong accent towards the under 34s and white collar voters. The PS still has notable areas of weakness among the over 65s and farmers, but it was striking too that the PS performed at only an average level-or even below it-among the unemployed. Perhaps most dramatic of all was the fact that the PS-for the first time in the history of French socialism-received more votes from women than from men. Recent debates within the PS have seen a great deal of talk about the need to reinforce the party’s organization, modernize its ideology, and generally consolidate the PS into a modern but still disciplined socialist party of government. Not too much attention need be paid to most such talk, for the 1986 result showed only too clearly what sort of party the PS has actually become. Its electorate is far too diverse to allow of any systematic ideological expression and shows a distinct bulge towards the middle and lower middle levels of the social structure, away from the really disadvantaged dasses below that-hardly what one expects of a traditional Left electorate, but perhaps what one should expect of a potential majoritarian party. More worrying to the PS is the fact that its electorate is far too heavily dependent on marginally committed voters-who don’t join political parties. It is unlikely that the PS is ever going to attract many more than its present 200,000 members. Above all, its electorate is volatile. Around 45 per cent of the 18 to 34 age group had supported it in 1981; a whole half of them defected by 1984; and then two-thirds or more of those lost voters came surging back in 1986. It is, moreover, increasingly a leadership, not an ideology-driven party. It depended utterly in 1986 on Mitterrand’s prestige and imp&ion and the resuhs gained by Fabius, Chevenement, Jospin, Lang and Hernu all illustrate that the aura of leadership and governmental autho~ty was crucial at lower levels as well. It is a catch-all party in the sense that it is seen increasingly as being Ioosely coterminus with ‘the Left’-hitting not only the PCF but also the Ecologists (whose vote did not improve from its 198 1 misery level) and the MRG (who elected only one deputy); but also in the sense that within the electorate it now corresponds merely to a broad and diffuse set of sensibilities with
248
The French General Election o/ I6 March 1986
little programmatic content of any kind. Such managerialist style of a Fabius, the ever-vaguer of the US Democratic party favoured by some above all, the party of Mitterrandist legitimacy. ideological mould.
The Nationalization
a party may well provide a base for the new republicanism of a Chevenement or the style Rocardians. But at the moment the party is, It is unlikely to be recast into any disciplined
and Homogenization
of Party
Support
Overall, the election saw a move not only towards the nationalization of political forces but towards their social homogenization. At the party level what has happened since 198 1 is a complex domino-effect, with the PCF losing voters primarily to the PS and abstention, the PS losing to the orthodox right, and the right to the FN-together, of course, with lesser movements direct from PCF and PS to the FN, and even some minor contra-flows from the right to the left. What this meant was a dramatic decline in the class cleavage: whereas threequarters of the industrial working class had voted Left in the mid-1970s in 1986 only 54 per cent did so. Among all wage and salary-earners the proportion voting Left fell from 63 per cent in 1978 to 50 per cent in 1986. (The swing was most notable among private sector workers.) Wage and salary-earners have thus shown a swing against the left almost three times greater than the electorate as a whole. Just as striking was the political homogenization between the sexes (see Table 7). The swing to the right in 1986 was thus considerably greater among men. With the swing to the right among workers, providing a notable echo of the 1979 British, and 1980 American elections, suggesting a genuine sociological configuration for the emergence of the ‘new Right’. It is even possible that a gender gap in favour of the left may be about to open up in France, for while only 40 per cent of young men aged 18 to 20 voted Left, 53 per cent of their female peers did so.14 This new pattern may well not prove stable, however, for it results from two highly dynamic elements, the sharp decline of the PCF and the simultaneous success of the FN in attracting a more popular electorate. Again, the breakdown of voting by sex provides the clearest illustration (see Table 8). The process of homogenization thus rests essentially on the identical twin poles of the FN and the PCF, with their disproportionately male electorates. Once these are established as ‘givens’, it follows that all others must have a feminine predominance. But that in turn means that a continued process of homogenization rests on these two extreme minor blocs remaining stable-which seems doubly unlikely. The PCF appears to be headed for continued rapid decline and how the FN electorate holds together through ‘cohabitation’, a return to majority voting and the ensuing presidential election is an open question. What has happened at the moment is the fulfilment-to a quite extreme degree-of the tendency towards a quadrilateralization of political forces with the rise of the central blocs. But now, instead of the RPR constituting the rightward wing of that quadrilateral, the FN does instead and the RPR, conflated with the UDF, has become one of the two majoritarian central blocs. Powerful pressures exist to maintain this effective fusion of the RPR and UDF-disunity will let either the FN or PCF win extra seats and will be poorly received by an essentially undifferentiated UDF-RPR electorate. But it also seems certain that the first ballot of the next presidential election will shatter the RPR-UDF parliamentary alliance, as the second ballot will tend to reunite the conservative electorate. If either party’s contender wins that contest he will be likely to try to consolidate the supremacy of his’own particular party at the expense of its ally. This too will have centrifugal effects and may de-stabilize the neat picture of homogenization before it has set in any mould. Moreover, Chirac’s reintroduction of the
DAVID 8. GOLDEYAND R. W. JOHNSON
249
TABLE 7. Percentage of men and women voting for
the right, French legislative elections, 1967-86 1967
1973
1978
1981
Women Men
65 48
59
51
44
55
50
45
41
55
Difference
17
9
6
3
0
Source: 0. Duhamel and E. Dupoirier, 21-27 March 1986.
1986
t ‘fipess,
TABLE 8. Percentage of men and women voting for parties, 1986
Men Women
PCF
PS
RPR/UDF
FN
12 7
Other
30
40
12
6
34
45
7
7
old electoral system will have the effect of all but eliminating both the PCF and FN from the parliamentary-and thus possibly the electoral-scene altogether. Either way, it is difficult now to imagine the effective dominance of the PS and RPR-UDF being broken. One cannot but be impressed by the long-term nature of many of the trends observed above. The presidential domination of the political system, which lies at the root of so many of these trends and which this election illustrated once again, is not going to go away.
‘Cohabitation’
or ‘Coexistence’
The disappointed expectation of a safe majority in Parliament for the respectable right, fostered by the opinion polls, and the better than anticipated showing of the PS structured early interpretations of the results. The right was more subdued and the PS more optimistic than the electoral result appeared to warrant; for the dipartemental PR electoral system chosen by the outgoing government had accomplished its purpose: depriving the right of a parliamentary majority equal to that enjoyed by the PS in 198 1, that it would have had if the old second ballot majority system had been maintained. The sense that the PS and the President had saved their chestnuts from the fire and the thin Assembly majority for the RPR-UDF created a climate favourable to Mitterrand in the potentially difficult transition period. That allowed the President temporarily to take the initiative from Chirac in the formation of a new government, as he had seized it in the campaign, justifying the forebodings of some RPR deputies that their leader would be no match for Mitterrand in the manceuvring for position inherent in cohabitation. Moreover, despite the lengthy public debate within the right over cohabitation (Giscard’s phrase), Mitterrand, with his experience of the Fourth Republic had thought more profoundly and practically about the likely problems of coexistence (his word). Mitterrand had dreamed of what was the nightmare not only of the RPR-UDF but also of the PS: a hung parliament with no right wing majority without the FN. That would have
250
The Franc-h GenerJ Election qi 16 Alarch 1986
embarrassed the respectable right; encouraged Le Pen to up the ante and demand a ministry: and been used as an excuse for the PS to enter a coalition government to keep the FN out. But PS participation in right wing government would have placed great strains on the cohesion of the PS and allon- the PCF to cry treason, again making the PS vulnerable to PCF reproach. as it had its predecessor (the SFIO) in the Fourth Republic. However, such a coalition government, with an unstable majority, would have given Mitterrand the maximum room for manoeuvre, and there were potential prime ministers for it, waiting in the wings. Jacques Chaban-Delmas was one: Pompidou’s prime minister, defeated for the presidency in 1974 by Giscard and Chirac, and Mitterrand’s old crony from the previous Republic. Mme Simone Veil. Giscard’s most popular minister, head of the joint RPR-UDF list for the 1984 European election was another. After a notable absence from the campaign she suddenly reappeared on television the night of the election-in a tricolour costume. In the event, the slim majority for the respectable right precluded such combinations, provided RPR and UDF could overcome their rivalries. Leaders of the two formations thus met in the Paris city hall to limit the scope of presidential discretion, although constitutionally Mitterrand had a free choice of prime minister. They would accept no one who had not obtained their prior approval: who had not negotiated and run on the joint RPR-UDF programme; and who had not participated actively in the joint campaign. These conditions effectively eliminated Barre. \‘eil and Chaban. They demonstrated how much the right feared Mitterrand’s fine Italian hand, but the conditions had the effect of committing the Gaullists and their allies to the rigime despurtis, so often, eloquently and effectively decried by the General. That, in turn. allowed hlitterrand to strike his preferred Gaullian posture of presidential rectitude, above the party melee. Mitterrand consulted his friends and his recently named President of the Constitutional Council, former Minister of Justice Robert Badinter. On Monday night he appeared briefly on television, from the Elysee. to assert the primacy of his office: the President was charged with seeing that the Constitution was respected; he alone chose the prime minister. The country had spoken: there was a clear if narrow majority. He wished it success by its own lights. Only then was Chirac summoned to the Elysee and given the task of constructing a government for presidential approval. He was not yet officially named prime minister, however. Mitterrand let it be known that the foreign affairs and defence portfolios-the ‘reserved sector’-should be held by nominees acceptable to him. He objected to Jean Lecanuet, President of the UDF, at Foreign Affairs as too Atlantic and European-a reproach shared by the Gaullists; to Leotard at Defence as too inexperienced; and to Charles Pasqua (Chirac’s bully boy) at Interior, and Alain Madelin, for insulting the President. To the fury of Lecanuet and the chagrin of Leotard, Chirac gracefully gave way on what he had never been inclined to give away in any case. Lecanuet refused anything but the foreign ministry and Leotard had to be satisfied with Culture (including broadcasting). Other young Republican turks got Industry (Madelin) and Posts & Telecommunications, with its large R. 81 D. budget (Longuet). Pierre Mehaignerie, leader of the CDS was rewarded with a large Ministry of Equipment & Housing, to remind his party of what they might enjoy if they abandoned Raymond Barre. Chirac, however, kept the key ministries of Interior and Finance for his faithful followers, Pasqua and Balladur, showing the limits of his willingness to compromise with the President or the UDF. Edouard Balladur had been Pompidou’s general secretary of the Elysee and was Chirac’s latest preferred counsellor, who had convinced him to calm down, promise less, and serve as prime minister under a Socialist President. Giscard had unrealistically coveted an enlarged Ministry of Finance and Reconstruction, which would have made him the second prime minister and placed him in the 1988 presidential stakes. Denied that, he
DAVIDB.
G~LDEY AXD
R.
W. JOHNKIN
251
announced his candidacy for the presidency of the Assembly-which had been promised to Chaban as compensation for getting out of Chirac’s way for the premiership. What was striking in Chirac’s cabinet-making was that he set out to accomplish at ministerial level what he had signally failed to achieve with his parliamentary personnel: to bypass and replace the old leaders from previous conservative administrations, and bring forward a new, young and (hopefully) attractive cohort, beholden to him. He succeeded in so doing, at the cost of the solid enmity of those bypassed in the UDF and also in the RPR. (They were soon to return the favour by criticizing him from the right.) The FN was also studiously ignored, despite Le Pen’s insistence that it too was part of the new right wing majority; but in the regions, the FN negotiated with local RPR-UDF leaders, who got FN support in exchange for FN posts in the regional executive, both where the party was necessary for a conservative majority-and where it was not (see the article by Sonia Mazey, p. 297). Mitterrand could influence Chirac’s cabinet-making, then, thanks to the narrow political balance, and their shared interest in maintaining cohabitation/coexistence, partly because of its general popularity. In these circumstances Mitterrand had real but limited power-and he made the most of it. He clearly distanced himself from an administration whose policies he opposed, by refusing to be photographed with the government-or even shaking hands with all its members at cabinet meetings. He made it clear he would not aid the government by signing the necessary ordinances if it took decree powers to lift administrative restraints on declaring redundancies, or denationalize firms taken into public ownership before 198 1, or if it gerrymandered the new constituencies for the restored second ballot majority system. The government could bypass his opposition by taking the longer legislative route in the former two cases, but in the latter its majority might not stand the strain of an extended parliamentary debate. Moreover, he counted on the Constitutional Council to further constrain the government on privatization and redistricting. Effective power thus passed from the Elysee to Matignon, but the government’s fragile majority enabled the President to delay, set down markers and appeal to public opinion. Those deprived of office, led by Giscard, Lecanuet, some Barristes (though not their leader) and Le Figaro (impatient for the revocation of the 1984 press law and the sale of one of the state television stations) were quick to criticize the government for not going far and fast enough. Just as the left had, the right discovered that its electoral panaceas were not all entirely or immediately applicable in practice. The sniping from his rear weakened Chirac’s vir-&is Mitterrand and allowed the President to make good on some of his threats, whereas against a solid, united majority he would have had ‘to give way or get out’. What was clear was that the constitutional experiment was extremely popular with the French electorate, which saw in it an expression of an underlying national consensus, a promise of moderation in policy-and the hope of no presidential election until the end of Mitterrand’s normal term in 1988. That helped Mitterrand in the polls more than Chirac, who had the more partisan role; and it bound the two opponents together-temporarily. For neither could count on the experiment going to term; each was looking for the favourable ground and moment to push the other into breaking the pact; both were preparing for a trial of strength in late 1986 or early 1987-probably a presidential contest a year early. In other words, the competition for the next presidential election, which structured the parliamentary campaign, continues unavowed and unabated. On the left, it is likely to reinforce the predominance of the PS; on the right, the party of the candidate of the RPR or (less clearly) the UDF, who wins through to the run-off. Despite the worst result for the left in 20 years in 1986, it would be an incautious observer now who would be willing to bet on the outcome of the continuing struggle for power.
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The French General Election of 16 March 19~6 Notes
and References
1. Realigning election G. Le Gall. ‘Le nouvel order electoral’, Revue Politique & Parlementaire (RPP), 893. July-August 1981; for an analysis of the results and their significance, see D. B. Goldey and A. F. Knapp, ‘Time for a Change’. Electoralstudies, 1:l. 1982, and 1:2, 1982. 2. For the evolution of public opinion. 198 l-85, see the successive volumes of SOFRES, L ‘Opinion publique, 1984; 1985; 2 986 (Paris, 1984, 1985 and 1986); Jean-Luc Parodi, Olivier Duhamel, Jerome Jaffre, ‘Chronique de l’opinion publique’, in: Pouvoirs (quarterly) 19 (1981) to 36 (1986); G. Le Gail, ‘Sondages: l’etat de l’opinion’, RPP, 921, January-February 1986; J. Lecaillon and J.-D. Lafay, ‘La Popularite en politique: Bilan de cinq ans’, Commentaire, 33, Spring 1986. 3. For this paragraph in general see note 2 above. As well: for the FN see, G. Birenbaum, ‘Front National: les mutations d’un groupuscule’, and P. Perrineau, ‘Quel avenir pour le Front National. ?‘, Intervention, 15, January-FebruaryMarch 1986; P. Perrineau, ‘Le Front National: un electorat autoritaire’, R!!P, 918, JulyAugust 1985; Monica Charlot, ‘L’Emergence du Front National’, Revue FranGaise de Science Politique (RASP) XXXVI: 1, February 1986. For the respectable right: W. R. Schonfeld, ‘Le RPR et I’UDF a I’epreuve de l’opposition’, RFSP, op. cit.; ‘L’Opposition, est-elle credible ?‘, L ‘Express, 5 October 1984; ‘Les Francais regardent a droite’, Expansion, 21 February 1986; A. Duhamel, ‘16 mars: les attentes des francais’, L’Expess, 31 January 1986. For the declining credibility of conventional political parties, ‘Partis Politiques: la vague de reject’, .!z Point, 24 February 1986 and J. Charlot. ‘La Transformation de l’image des partis politiques francais, RFSP, op. cit. 4. On the 1984 European elections, see J. and M. Charlot. ‘France’, ElectoralStudies. 3:3. 1984; G. Le Gall, ‘Une Election sans enjeu, avec consequences’, and J.-L. Parodi, ‘Les cinqs absents de l’election europeenne’, RPP, 910, May-June 1984: A. Lancelot, ‘L’Eurosanction’, Projet, 188, September-October 1984. For the decline of the PCF, see J. Ranger, ‘Le De&n du Parti Communiste Francais, RFSP, op. cit. 5. For the 1985 cantonal election, see J.-L. Parodi, ‘La Repetition des Europkes’; G. Le Gall. ‘Une Election de confirmation’, and A. Lancelot, ‘L’lnsupportable majorite: les cantonales de mars 1985’, Projet, 193, May-June 1985. 6. On the 1985 change to PR, see, A. F. Knapp, ‘Orderly Retreat: Mitterrand Chooses PR’. Electoral Studies, 4:3, 1985; ‘Le nombre de deputes’, Populations et Sociktis, 199, February 1986; b Monde (dossiers and documents), ‘Les Modes de Scrutin en France’. 129. January 1986; Pouvoirs, ‘La Representation proportionnelle’, 32, 1985. 7. The tour dkisgis a theoretical construct aimed at showing the fundamental split of the vote. In double ballot elections it consists of the left-right division on the second round, plus the similar division on the first round in seats won outright at that stage. In 1986, of course, the sole ballot was also, by definition, the tour d&i$. 8. See ‘Special Mars 86’, a dossier on the elections edited by 0. Duhamel and E. Dupoirier. L ‘Express, 21-27 March 1986. 9. IFOPgave the 11 per cent figure. See L’Ezjenement du Jeudi, 20-26 March 1986. BVA gave 14 per cent, Libhation, 18 March 1986; SOFRES gave 17 per cent, see Duhamel and Dupoirier, op. cit. 10. Duhamel and Dupoirier, op. cit. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. By July 1986 the proportion of FN voters favouring Mitterrand had risen to 30 per cent, with 15 per cent still undecided. 13. G. Le Gall, ‘~Mars 1986: Des Elections de Transition ?‘, Revue Pohtique et Parlementaire, 922, March-April 1986. 14. Duhamel and Dupoirier, op. cit.