The French presidential election of 24 April–8 May and the general election of 5–12 June 1988

Electoral Sludres (1988), 7:3. 195-223

The French Presidential Election of 24 April-8 May and The General Election of 5-12 June 1988 DAVIDB. GOLDEY * Lincoln College, Oxford OX1 3DR, England

R. W. JOHNKIN** Magahlen College, Oxford OX1 3AU, England

The French presidential and legislative elections of 1988 and their aftermath provided a full test of the constitutional arrangements of the Fifth Republic. This article describes the tactical considerations behind President Mitterrand’s own campaign for re-election and behind the manoeuvrings of the various candidates on the right. It reports on the conduct and outcome of the presidential campaign and on the decision to move on to an immediate dissolution of the National Assembly. The campaign and the paradoxical outcome of the return to scrulin li deux tours are fully examined. The 1988 French presidential and parliamentary elections were remarkable both for their elements of change and of continuity. Change was the most apparent feature of the 1988 presidential and parliamentary elections. The presidential contest marked the first time a directly elected incumbent was returned for a second seven-year term; the general election, the first time a dissolution following a referendum (1962) or presidential poll (1981) had not returned a safe parliamentary majority for the president. The presidential election marked a record high for the National Front (FN) and indeed the extreme right in French politics, a record low for the Communist party (PCF); the parliamentary contest the first (slight) increase in the PCF share of the vote since 198 1. Finally, turnout on the first ballot of the general election was the lowest in any such election since 1871. If change was the most apparent feature of the presidential and parliamentary results, the

Dr Goldey would like to thank the Lincoln College Research Fund for helping him to go to France to study the elections. * Mr Johnson would like to thank the Nuffield Foundation and the Oxford Board of the Faculty of Social Studies for helping him to go to France to study the elections. l

l

0261.3794/88/03/0195-291903.00

0 1988 Butterworth

& Co (Publishers)

Ltd

underlying continuities of electoral behaviour were perhaps of equal significance. The con tinuing rise of the PS and its domination of the left: the slow decline of the parliamentary right, its traditional fissiparous tendencies reemerging with the ending of a properly Gaullist discipline and the rise and consolidation of an extreme right; a general loss of faith in political panaceas and in providential personalities, marked this as previous elections. The increasing tendency of women to vote left, the rise of something like the independent electorate in the United States: the volatility of the electorate and the importance of differential turnout; the continuation of long-term regional evolutions. as the east and west move from their traditional conservative allegiance towards a moderate socialism, while the southeast moves from its traditional moorings on the left towards the parliamentary centre and sometimes the extreme-right. in both the east and south, indeed, a protest vote for the National Front may have provided the occasion for the break with traditional allegiance that then allows a transfer of support. 1 Finally, the voters have provided their political leaders with yet another opportunity to test the possibilities of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic. If 1986 was in some sense the equivalent of an American mid-term election which, contrary to previous French practice, favoured the opposition, then 1988 was an exercise in ticket-splitting. But though the French President names the prime minister, his government depends on the National Assembly for its survival. The Constitution of the Fifth Republic. with its limits on parliamentary sovereignty, was written to rein-in an over-mighty Assembly since, in 1958, it was assumed stable majority parties would forever be impossible in France. In 1986. the French returned a narrow but stable majority hostile to the President, power flowed to the Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, and the French enjoyed the novel constitutional experiment of cohabitation between a Socialist President and a conservative Prime Minister-while consistently assuring pollsters they wished for a return to a President and Assembly of the same stripe. Ln 1988, the Socialists became the largest single party in the Assembly, but short of a majority by 13. The next year will tell whether the constitutional powers given to president and prime minister against the Assembly and the notional political incompatibility between the right and the PCF will allow Prime Minister Rocard’s government not simply to survive but also to govern. For President Mitterrand, having dissolved the 1986 Assembly before the end of its term, may not now dissolve again for 12 months. From

1986 to 1988

Cohabitation has meant that an unofficial presidential campaign has been raging over the past two years.2 The experience was perhaps personally more difficult for Mitterrand, but poiitically more dangerous for Chirac. For the President could-and did-claim credit for some of the continuities in economic policy while disclaiming any responsibility for the difficulties-some of them wilfully courted-by the government. Chirac needed the premiership to establish his credibility as a statesman; but his dependence on his advisers made him even more vulnerable to the disagreeable surprises that face any government, particularly since his counsellors were themselves divided on political strategy. In particular, the tension between the priority to be given to the social issue, law and order and immigration versus economic management, unemployment and privatization was never properly resolved. The former involved courting the National Front, which risked alienating crucial central voters, and provoked as much outspoken opposition from within Chirac’s own RPR as from some of his UDF allies. Economic policy was not without its problems either, however. Adepts of laissez-faire and Reaganomics sat uneasily in the RPR with its

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Colbertist &igiJtes and economic nationalists inherited from its Gaullist predecessors. In the UDF, Francois Leotard’s clique of free marketeers in the Republicans (PR), had to compete with the characteristically subsidy-hungry deputies of conservative rural France and Chirac’s own agriculture minister, recruited straight from the farmers’ lobby (FNSEA), and the solid Catholic traditions in the UDF of the Centre Democrats (CDS). Prizes for the best and the brightest with not much concern for the rest might appeal to Paris region and C&e d’ Azure yuppies, to small businessmen anxious to be free of state regulations, and to the tax-avoiding liberal professions, but was not particularly popular with the modest provincial electorate inherited from Gaullism. There was a problem here too with Chirac’s embrace of the united European market, due in 1992, again contrary to the traditions of successive Gaullist parties, and one of the issues uniting Christian democrats and socialists in France since the war. Finally, Mitterrand remained the undisputed leader of the PS, and the party’s most plausible candidate to hold the presidency in 1988; and it was clear that the ~mmunists were at their weakest in that election. But on the right, former prime minister Raymond Barre, encouraged by the polls, was determined to stand. Should he have faltered, Leotard was anxious to try his luck, while former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing was also waiting in the wings. Finally, there was the wild card of the right, Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the Front National, an accomplished demagogue of the extreme-right and a skilful and cynical political operator. His interest lay in leeching Chirac’s RPR, either by defeating Chirac or by being accepted as his inevitable ally, preferably both. Chirac, therefore, had almost as much to fear from his notional allies as from his declared political enemies. It is not evident that he-or any other current leader of the right--could have seen down the challenge of the FN without losing the election. But Chirac’s unwillingness to decide how to deal with Le Pen and his contradictory statements on race and immigration encouraged the divisions on the issue within the conservative camp, damaged his reputation and cost him votes in the centre without winning over those of the Front National. Mitterrand unhesitatingly capitalized on and exacerbated these weaknesses in his opponent’s positions. In the winter of 1986187 he exploited the Prime Minister’s problems of rioting students and striking workers. On issues that might be damaging to, or difficult for the majority-privatization, ending administrative delays in declaring redundancies, redistricting, New Caledonia, changing the legal status of the rtgie Renault-he made public his doubts, and forced the government to go to Parliament, and thus through the Constitutional Council, or refused to call the special session of Parliament requested by the Prime Minister. From the summer session of 1987, however. he was careful to preserve his position as a President above the battle, guardian of the Constitution, while the RPR took off its gloves and attacked him virulently, to discourage him from standing. For a time it looked as if the right would try and use a series of scandals from the previous Socialist administration to try and implicate the President. But the Socialists had their own ammunition to use against the RPR, and Chirac’s reputation for playing dirty was something that had to be overcome if he were to succeed in the statesmanship stakes. For a time in the ‘silly season’ the weekly news magazines were full of gloomy analyses of French decline, perhaps a consequence of Chirac’s incautious boasts that France was catching up with Germany coinciding with the release of a report suggesting that she was instead falling behind Spain and Italy. Some of the gloom may have been inspired by Barristes, reckoning it would help their candidate, once dubbed by Giscard ‘the best economist in France’. Instead, it was picked up by Le Pen and fed his campaign against the leaders of left and right.

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The French Presidential Eiection and the General Elechon

The Crash of October

1987

More important was the stock market crash of October 1987. The crash took the shine off denationalization. Not only did the quotations of the newly privatized firms fall below their issue prices; it made further privatizations impossible, at least for the time being. But the receipts from these operations were part of Finance Minister Edouard Balladur’s strategy to reduce both the public debt and taxation in time for the election, and to create a class of grateful shareholders. The crash and continuing problems with the balance-of-trade meant that the government could not trumpet its economic successes as it had hoped. That left it with law and order, associated with immigration, but that was a double-edged issue, since it reminded voters troubled by the problem, of the FN. Although Le Pen had too candidly dismissed Nazi genocide as ‘a point of detail’ in a radio interview in September, the damage was short-lived: his electors considered him a vehicle to express their frustration not a plausible candidate for the presidency.3 The October crash appears to have convinced Mitterrand that he would win-and that he was the only Socialist candidate who could do so. It was Barre’s opportunity to distance himself from Chirac, and on favourable terrain, to start his campaign. But he remained inert. The Elysee, however, had organized an office, under Pisani, to consider the themes of the campaign; citizens’ committees for Mitterrand were being organized in the provinces; former Minister of Culture Jacques Lang encouraged absurd demonstrations, dubbed tontonmaniu; and hoardings for a postering campaign and the posters to go on them, were being prepared. The President could do no less if he were later to decide to run. Journalists who wished to write a book on the President’s campaign were given the imprimatur in October-though no further information until February.4

Campaign

Strategies

The campaign thus officially still lacked its three main protagonists: Chirac and Mitterrand because they had every interest in holding off as long as possible and were using the advantages of their political functions to campaign indirectly; Raymond Barre, who needed to start earlier to confirm his uncertain electorate but was badly advised, over-confident, and unwilling in any case to accept that he might have made a mistake in his initial strategy. That left the field to Andre Lajoinie, the lacklustre candidate of the PCF who had enough problems without a challenge from a dissident Communist, Pierre Juquin; and to JeanMarie Le Pen who ran the most exciting campaign with the best slogans and posters (one of a neck-and-neck horse race with, ‘The Outsider . . Defend Your Colours’), another with Giscard’s slogan, ‘two Frenchmen in three’ in favour of Le Pen’s panaceas: the death penalty, expatriation of immigrants etc. In December a poster campaign, paid for by the government, vaunted the merits of its record, but still Barre did not budge. At the end of January, as the polls showed a renewal of confidence-and renewed satisfaction-with the Prime Minister and the President-Chirac pushed the date of the announcement of his candidature forward and wrong-footed Barre. The RPR characteristically secured the signature of some UDF notables in support of Chirac, exasperating Barre and his hapless team. Barre finally announced in February, but behaved as if the president were still elected by a college of notables as in 1958. He junketed around the country, calling on presidents of regional and departmental councils and big city mayors. In part, this was a reflection of the nature and strength of the UDF, dug in at local level, with a plethora of notables, but without any real central organization of its own. Of its component parts, only the Christian democratic centre (CDS) and the Republicans (PR) were real parties: the former had little in

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the way of central organization; the latter was divided amongst followers of Leotard, Giscard and Barre. Leotard and Giscard had the most to lose from a Barre victory; the former controlled the organization of the party, such as it was, and made it clear that Barre was not his first choice. The latter explained that the right needed a single candidate for the first ballot, and he would support the winner of the primary on the run-off. These problems were to shadow Barre throughout his campaign, made worse by his own stubbomess and lack of political acumen. Mitterrand’s strategy was to stay out of the race in the hope that Barre and Chirac would be forced to campaign against each other-and to debate on how to deal with L.e Pen-thus making the transfer of votes between the two on the second ballot more difficult, as between Chirac and G&card in 198 1. The President and his advisers reckoned Barre was the more dangerous second ballot rival, since he was a less partisan figure than Chirac, more attractive to the centrist electorate that would decide the contest. The President therefore set out to make cohabitation work, in so far as the Prime Minister would let him, while emphasizing his own prerogatives in defence and foreign affairs. Chirac had a common interest in making the arrangement work, and they were both helped by Barre’s over-confidence and political incompetence. Barre clearly did believe that not having effective party support was not only a tribute to Gaullist constitutional orthodoxy but also a real political advantage. France’s best economist was one of its worst politicians. Barre’s refusal to see his own self-interest in an early start to his campaign made it the easier for the President and Prime Minister to delay throwing their hats into the ring and to capitalize in the meantime on their offices and the exposure, prestige and patronage it gave them. Their political problems were otherwise, however, rather different. Chirac wanted to run on his record as prime minister, generally agreed to be a good one. His problem was to come ahead on the first ballot without alienating Barre and his supporters-or Jean-Marie Le Pen and his. This was not an easy task and not unlike Mitterrand’s dilemma in 1974 and 1978 of getting both the Communists and the centre-left to vote for him. His other problem was that he was thought to be influen~able and impulsive. So, following the government’s vaunting its own merits, there followed a publicity campaign showing a relaxed, smiling Chirac, with tributes to his, humanity, kindness, tolerance, strength of character. This was to be coupled with veiled attacks on Mitterrand for his age, his alliance with the Communists, his first three years in office, and lingering doubts about his character, exploited through scandals. Mitterrand’s tactic was to void the attacks on age and previous policies with a campaign making him grandfather of the nation, ‘Generation Mitterrand’, with a hand extended to a baby; and to talk-not very precisely-of the future rather than dwelling on the past. This rather American approach was also meant to allow the President to extend his majority to the centre. For not only was the Communist party no longer a threat to Socialist hegemony or a bogyman for voters, it had become so weak that together Socialists and Communists had no majority. Moreover, the PC was now distinctly hostile to the Socialists, divided from it on policy, unwilling to govern with it, though anxious as ever for the second ballot alliance, necessary if any Communist elected officials were ever to be returned. Mitterrand ignored the Communists and countered the Ecologists’ candidate, Antoine Waechter, by including their 1981 standard bearer, Brice Lalonde, in his campaign team. One reason Mitterrand did not want a long campaign was that he was short of subjects to campaign on. He did not want to recall the Common Programme or the period 1981-83; neither did he want to dwell on the austerity of 1983-86. With a weakened Communist party, he was now out to dislocate the right wing coalition by detaching from it the former opposition centrists from the MRP and the old Radical party, who had progressively joined it

200

The French PresidentiulElection and the General Election

under Pompidou and Giscard, both because their electors were that way inclined and because the Communist alliance was anathema to them. Now the threat from the extremes came not from the left but from the right, from Jean Marie Le Pen’s National Front: racist, xenophobic, authoritarian, populist and anti-parliamentary in politics and integrist in religion (to the extent that still mattered), the old enemies of French secularist republicans and Christian democrats alike. Chirac now found that Le Pen’s themes appealed to some of his voters and militants. If he fought Le Pen outright, the latter might easily cost him the election; if he compromised with him, that might cost the right the crucial margin of centrist votes needed for victory. Characteristically, Chirac temporized, remarking sympathetically in Marseilles that he ‘understood’ the anti-immigrant sentiments vehemently expressed to him there, the next week telling an audience in the French West Indies that ‘we are all of mixed blood’. Mitterrand and the Socialists kept the problem of an alliance with the FN before the electorate to separate Barre from Chirac and to discredit the latter, though it caused some problems for the PS too. Should it support centrists against the FN? The divisions within the PS over ouverture, the opening to the centre were evident in the autumn of 1987. In the end, the President’s strategy worked almost too well. Chirac is a formidable campaigner and the RPR a well-oiled, well-heeled machine; once the Chirac ~ndwagon started rolling, Barre was marginalized. The problem for Barre was that he had a second ballot strategy-as the responsible conservative capable of beating Mitterrand-but no real first ballot strategy, so confident was he of beating Chirac. Instead, he was squeezed on the left by Mitterrand, on the right by Chirac. For Chirac was the more attractive candidate for the right on the first ballot. Chirac’s problem was that he had a first ballot strategy to beat Barre, but was boxed in on his right by Le Pen. He gained in the polls-at Barre’s expensebut the total for the par~ament~y right declined. 5 Chirac was then paralysed, caught between the contradictory advice of Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, urging him to make a populist play for Le Pen’s support, and Balladur pushing him to bid for Barre’s clientele. He might have escaped the dilemma by switching straight to a second-ballot campaign, assuming he would come ahead on the right on the first round, and comparing his government’s record with Mitterrand’s, ignoring Le Pen and Barre, as some of his pollsters advised him. But he and his advisers feared the Barristes would not forgive him, and do to him on the second ballot what he had done to Giscard in 198 1. So he temporized, while Pasqua sought to spring the French hostages held in Beirut by the hez~~l~ before the first ballot (an operation perhaps delayed by the kidnapping of a Kuwaiti jumbo by other pro-Iranians).

The Official

Campaign

Mitterrand had delayed his campaign announcement to the last possible moment. When he declared on 22 March 1988, he launched his campaign with a swingeing attack on the right, The PS was much relieved, since it had been running an election campaign without a candidate, but there was then a curious interregnum. The President seemed to have thought that since the primary challenge was on the right, he hardly need campaign, preserving a useful non-partisan image for the second round, the better to take the Barre vote and embark on ouuerture. But that was the mistake de Gaulle had made in 1965; he took the electorate for granted. Campaign headquarters absurdly exaggerated Mitterrand’s initial bow to the centre; the candidate himself had only a few big meetings planned and was absent from the television. Unlike Chirac or Barre, however, Mitterrand saw the problem and corrected his initial error (more successfully than in the following general election}. Some water was put in the

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wine promised to the centre, and the President set out to mobilize the left on themes dear to it, while still trying to get his unwilling partisans to accept an opening to the centre and to centrist leaders. Possibly to sugar that bitter pill, possibly to further disrupt the right (or both), Mitterrand repeated his 198 1 proposition that immigrants should be given the vote in local elections-when public opinion was ready for the reform. That galvanized the National Front, forced Chirac to come out on the same side as Le Pen (and contrary to his earlier position when he had favoured such a change). It showed Mitterrand had lost none of his capacity to surprise and wrong-foot his opponents, and to play for high stakes. For the reform was by no means acceptable to the Socialist’s own popular electorate. It helped cost Chirac perhaps 2 per cent lost in the last few days of the campaign to the FN, but also a further 2 per cent of the Socialist vote also to Le Pen.6 Mitterrand had helped create a situation where the right would emerge from the first ballot divided in three, incapable of winning the run-off. But he thereby also contributed to a misinterpretation of his own victory, shared by himself and his party, which was in turn to cost him a majority in Parliament. Part of the difficulty came from playing with fire: anti-immigrant sentiment and the FN vote. Partly a protest vote, heterogeneous and cross-class, its volatility made it difficult to predict, the more so since it was a shamefaced vote. Mayors of villages and small towns who generally had a shrewd idea of the votes of their administrh were characteristically taken aback by the size of the vote in their communes, and unable to guess who had voted FN. The polling organizations had the same problem. As formerly with the Communist vote, they were unable to find enough voters who admitted to voting FN in the past, and their raw figures characteristically underestimated the vote by a third. That sort of short-fall also made it very difficult to construct a satisfactory sociological and ideological profile of the FN vote from opinion surveys. The final week of the campaign (as between ballots) polls may not be published-though of course they continue to be taken, and their (putative) results circulate. The final unpublished polls showed Mitterrand and Chirac down slightly, Barre up a little and Le Pen up by 50 per cent. Interior Minister Charles Pasqua characteristically leaked a phoney survey purporting to show Chirac with a quarter of the vote and the right (including Le Pen) at 5 5 per cent, conveniently the figure commonly agreed as necessary if Chirac were to win on the second round. The result, then, came as a shock not only to the mass electorate, but to those who thought of themselves as in the know. The success of L.e Pen and the failure of Chirac masked the relatively disappointing performance of Mitterrand and the catastrophic showing of Iajoinie. First Ballot

Results

The two major shocks of the first round were Le Pen’s 14.6 per cent score-the highest ever achieved by the extreme right and Chirac’s failure to breach even the 20 per cent line: seven years of frenetic politicking, including two as prime minister, had added less than 650,000 votes to Chirac’s 1981 score. Together the two representatives of the orthodox right, Barre and Chirac, achieved only 36.23 per cent-the lowest figure since 1945. Le Pen’s success was truly national this time: his vote rose everywhere and in some rural dbfartements, with hardly an immigrant in sight, it more than doubled. Locally this was sometimes explained as a protest vote by struggling small farmers afraid of 1992 and now fed up with Chirac and Agriculture Minister Francois Guillaume too. But it was impossible to avoid the impression of a generalized ultra-nationalist vote acting as a receptacle for all manner of protests, rather in the manner of Boulangism and of the Poujadist movementwhose youngest deputy Le Pen once was. Right along the southern littoral from the Alps to

202

The French ~esi~n~~~

Election and the General Eieetion

TABLE1. First ballot results of Presidential Election, 24 April 1988 (Metropolitan France only)

Voting Registered Valid votes Abstentions

30,317,248 36,955,866 29.713,323 6,638,618

82?l3 80.40 17.96

Barre Juquin Le Pen Chirac Mitterrand Boussel Waechter Laguiller Lajoinie

4,900,879 633,254 4,342,639 5,868,284 10,073,427 115,133 1,138,981 599,993 2,040,733

16.49 2.13 14.62 19.75 33.90 0.39 3.83 2.02 6.87

Source: Le Mode,

27 April 1988.

the Pyre&es, Le Pen captured 20 per cent and more of the vote, peaking in Bouches-duRhBne with 26.4 per cent. In Marseille’s 7th constituency Le Pen took nearly a third of the vote and across the city as a whole he headed the poll with 28.3 per cent, leading to serious calculations on all sides of his chances of capturing the muirie in 1989. But other town halls looked vulnerable too: Le Pen also headed the list in Aubagne, La Ciotat, Marignane, Nice, Ant&s, Toulon and many smaller southern towns, including Leotard’s redoubt of Frejus (where Barre ran a bad fourth-a result so bad as to lead Barre to point an accusing finger at Leotard, who indignantly denounced Barre as a poor campaigner). The peculiarly covert character of the Le Pen vote was reflected in many small southern towns where he took a fifth of the vote without a single Le Pen meeting or even poster, and no public sign of any local support. Le Pen’s breakthrough north of the Loire was in some ways even more striking: in Paris he nearly stole third place from Barre, while in Seine-et-Mame and Val-de-Mame he did so. In Saint-Denis and Val d’Oise he led the whole right and came second only to Mitterrand. Le Pen’s most sensational gains came, however, in Alsace: he took 22 per cent of the vote in both Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin (and 19.9 per cent in neighbouring Moselle). Theories to account for this remarkable upsurge varied: the Le Pen upsurge took Protestant votesautonomist between the wars, nationalist and Gaullist after 1945; many Alsatians work in Germany every day and were bitterly aware that Chirac’s heady talk of catching up with Germany in 1992 was nonsense particularly where the region itself was suffering from local decline; still others talked of the local repercussions of the recent prison mutiny at Ensisheim. What did seem certain was that Barre’s collapse in the polls had cast loose a large block of votes in this (normally) strongly Christian democratic area: while Le Pen’s vote soared, Barre’s vote was down by 27 per cent and 2 1 per cent on Giscard’s first round 198 1 score in Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin respectively; Chirac failed even to equal his 1981 scores; Mitterrand held the 1986 PS vote; and Waechter, the Ecologist and Haut-Rhin councillor, took 9.4 per cent and 9.2 per cent in the twodt@zrtements-by far his best scores anywhere in France. Polls had shown Le Pen’s following continuing the trend of 1984-86 away from the classic profile of the old right and increasingly towards a younger and more working class electorate. But, as Table 2 shows, 1988 did not wholly confirm this trend: Le Pen took the

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same 16 per cent share of the working class vote that he had in 1986, though among the unemployed his support rose to 19 per cent-more than twice the level achieved by Lajoinie. Overall, though, Le Pen attracted the support of 18 per cent of those who had voted for the RPR-UDF lists in I986 (while keeping 94 per cent of 1986 FN voters) and this was reflected by dramatic gains among more naturally conservative groups: among peasants Le Pen polled 18 per cent; among the liberal professions 21 per cent and among artisans and small businessmen a staggering 31 per cent. While racism and law and order continue to provide Le Pen’s most powerful themes, his following in 1988 was more concerned with unemployment and low wages, and had a decidedly more Poujadist shape, a fact with probable bearing on the FN’s persistence as a permanent feature of the French political scene. No less than 25 per cent of Le Pen’s voters agreed that Le Pen was a danger to democracy-presumably an appealing characteristic for the true enragt; or protestataireand far more of his voters than anyone else’s claimed to be attracted by their candidate’s ideas, rather than his personality. One trend which did continue was that Le Pen’s support has become ever more masculine: in 1984 59 per cent of his voters were male; in 1986 63 per cent; in 1988 69 per cent. Indeed, the gender factor is so striking among Le Pen’s support as to modify one’s picture of his support among social groups, as Table 3 shows. Among the artisans and small business group, women plumped for Chirac in even greater proportions than their male counterparts did for Le Pen; among the retired, women were only half as likely as men to support Le Pen, while among liberal professionals the male:female ratio rose to an extraordinary 4:l (only among upper m~agem~t were women more likely than their male counterparts to vote for Le Pen). It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast with the parties of the traditional right than this heavy male predominance-unless it was the fact that a higher proportion of Protestants (16.3 %) than of regularly practising Catholics (11.2 %) supported Le Pen. Chirac’s score was pretty much the inverse of Le Pen’s_his worst performance coming in Alsace and along the southern littoral. But in 198 1, of course, there had actually been three Gaullist candidates (Mace-Fr~ce Garaud, Michel Deb& and Chirac himself); compared to their combined scores Chirac progressed in only 23 d~~~~e~~~ts in 1988. Even this was largely due to a favourite son effect in Paris and in the Massif Central, as the dcipartements neighbouring Chirac’s own Correze plumped heavily for him-and gave Le Pen the lowest scores he got anywhere. But Chirac’s plight was illustrated even in Correze itself where he fell below his own 198 1 score: although Correze was the only df$kwtement to give Le Pen less than 6 per cent of the vote, Chirac was still losing more than anyone else to Le Pen so that even a 6 per cent defection to the far right was bound to hurt. Chirac owed his lead over Barre to his success among peasants and the professiond middle class (where, in both cases, he ran ahead of Barre by 36%-16%) and to an almost 2: 1 lead among the over 50s. To a considerable extent this was legitimist support flowing to Chirac as a conservative prime minister and then, when his poll lead was established, as the conservative front-runner. To that extent cohabitation paid off, for without it it is unlikely he would have made it to the second round at all. But Chirac’s problem was-as it had been in 1981-the narrowness of his support. Even in decline Barre still attracted more support from outside the ranks of those who had voted RPR-UDF in 1986 than Chirac and he still did better than Chirac among the under 35s. Hi campaign apart, Barre had three problems. One was that his support was evenly but thinly spread across all groups, but there was no single group of any kind that gave him a plurality of its support: even among the artisans and small businessmen, where he scored best (23%), he was considerably outdistanced by Le Pen. Secondly, UDF organization was

Source: Bull/BVA Exit poll, te Monde, ‘L’l&ction

SECTOR Public Private Self-employed Unemployed Housewives and retired

OCCUPATION Peasants Small business Liberal professions Upper management Teacher and social workers Junior managers Office workers Shop workers Industrial workers Low paid and unskilled

Presidentielle’,

6 4

SEX Men Women

AGE 18-24 25-34 35-49 50-64 65 and over

7

4

Total

1988.

; 7

11 6

2 2 0 1 4 7 7 3 17 21

9 5

Lajoinie

Boussel Laguiller Juquin

41 36 20 40 33

:: 34 43 36

;; 47

20 15

36 29 29

31 37

34

Mitterrand

3 5

4

Waechter

11 19 17 10 18

16 22 16 17 15 21 7 10

19 16 15 17 17

15 18

17

Barre

:: 10 23

13

:;1 27 12 18 15 13 7 9

36

17 13 17 29 31

19 21

20

Chirac

TABLE2. AnaIysis of first ballot vote by candidate, sex, age, profession and sector (%)

13 14 24 19 12

18 31 21 14 6 16 11 21 16 15

15 11 17 14 12

17 10

14

Le Pen

:: 39 53

37

::, 34

::

70 77 73 63 34

51 40 49 60 60

51

Total Barre Chirac Le Pen

!z

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R. VVT. JOHNXIN

205

both too weak and sometimes too little at his service to prop up his vote when it came under pressure-in seven db~artements his vote fell below 12 per cent and in Correze it was under 5 per cent. Finally, even strongly Barriste notables proved unable to deliver their vote to Barre. In 1983 only Defferre’s gerrymandering had prevented Jean-Claude Gaudin from making Marseilles a UDF city-Gaudin won a minority of seats on a majority of the vote. But in 1988 Gaudin could not prevent both Le Pen and Chirac overtaking Barre, who tailed in with only 13.2 per cent. It was a similar story in Toulouse, the fief of Dominique Baudis, a keen Barriste: Barre not only ran behind Chirac there but actually polled below his national average. Similarly, Barre ran behind Chirac in Giscard’s dipartement, Puy-demme. The only minor exceptions to this story were two strong traditionally conservative Catholic dbpartements of the inner West: Vendee, the dbfartement of Barre’s lieutenants, Philippe Mestre and Philippe de Villiers and Maine-et-Loire, where, thanks to strong Catholic support, Barre received his highest vote of the election; and Barre’s own dbfartement of RhBne-though even there he slipped back noticeably from his own 1986 score. This was in marked contrast to the RPR. Considering that the party has suffered grievous organizational damage at Le Pen’s hands-in some areas whole RPR local branches had defected to the FN-the RPR vote retained an impressive solidity. (In nine continental dbfat-tements Chirac actually fell below Chaban-Delmas’ score of 1974-seven were in and around Chaban’s redoubt of Aquitaine: a reflection of Chaban’s favourite-son appeal, not RPR weakness. But the other two were Nord and Par-de-Calais, a symbol of the decline of popular Gaullism.) Nowhere did the RPR vote collapse in the way that Barre’s quite frequently did, and even in Rhone Chirac was close behind Barre. But these were small achievements set alongside the larger disaster which had befallen the conservative camp in general: in 206 of the 333 largest towns held by the UDF and RPR Le Pen’s voters held the balance and of 5 5 5 metropolitan parliamentary constituencies, Chirac and Barre together achieved a majority in just 18. Mitterrand’s vote was impressively even across all classes and age groups as well as geographically: he fell under 25 per cent only in Alpes Maritimes and rose over 40 per cent in eight dbpartements, peaking with 44.5 per cent in his own dbpartement of Nievre. Despite the fact that he had added around 2 per cent to the PS’s 1986 national score, Mitterrand ran behind his party’s score in 37 dbpartements, with particularly large falls in DrBme, Belfort, Hautes Pyrenees and, to a lesser extent, Paris-where Juquin and Waechter ate into the PS vote. But there was no correlation with Le Pen’s performance: in Le Pen’s strongholds Mitterrand often scored useful increases over the 1986 PS vote. Similarly, there was no discernible pattern to Mitterrand’s best performances: he made large gains both in old working class socialist strongholds like Nord, and Pas-de-Calais and in rural dbpartements like Gers and Sat-the. Perhaps the most striking feature of the President’s performance was his relative success among the over 50s-where he ran neck and neck with Chirac; among upper management, where he ran clearly ahead of Chirac; and among women: not only was there a 37: 3 1 gender gap in his favour, but while only 76 per cent of male PS voters of 1986 stayed with Mitterrand in 1988, 83 per cent of 1986 PS women voters did. These gains among traditionally more conservative groups bear witness to the fact that Mitterrand has enlarged the Socialist audience only partly at the expense of the Communists. Mitterrand outpolled Lajoinie by a margin of 7:3 among industrial workers, but the latter are still not as prone to support the Socialists as are schoolteachers. As Table 3 shows, the pattern of gender preferences is both a striking and often a somewhat mysterious feature of the electoral scene. Barre’s strong performance among women

--

1

1

I I

_..

2

2

1 2

1

2

6 3

-_---..--

-

--

21

_._~..___~_

: ---._I_

5 5

Laguiller

2

-

5

6

7

7

10

13 5

-

22

47

7

11

18 10

Lajoinie

___

.___

2

1

2 4

1

1

3 1

2 5

41

43

_..---

40

34

24 43

26

32

35 45

17 11

::

33 44

42

34

41 53

Mitterrand

2 -- -.----

4

3 1

Juquin

4

3

Presidentielle,

17

18

27 20

1988.

19

21

24 17

31

24 4 8

27

13

:

10 I1

15 40

22 23

17 15

I5

6 13

-_-

24 23

23 19

15 17

16

_~~--

Chirac

5 8 16 4 --I_---~--------______ 15 10

Rarre

6 5

2 4

64

65

;

3 2

Waechter

Source: Sondage Bull BVA, 24 April 1988, (3,500 sample size), Id Monde, ‘t’&ction

-

-

-

Women

Men Women --

-

-

--__.

Men Women -Men

---

Men Women

Women working outside the home

Housewives

Students

Retired

Unemployed

Smafl business and artisan

____.__~

Upper management

-1

-________. Men Women -1

1

Men Women

Women ------~

1

Middle management

workers --__

-

sex Boussel

Men Women _ White collar Men

Blue collar workers

Profession

TABLE 3. First ballot vote by candidate, sex and profession (%)

10

15

10 6

7

14

21 17

37 16

109

16 10

11

21

17 9

Le Pen

-__

50

43

35 49

35

57 54 _ - -45

22 17

42 42

46 53

::

67 69

Total left

-._-_

--

46

54

-61 43

62

54

37 41

5;

54 52

48 42

42 -.-

46

30 29

Total right

_.l

-

.w.

: ?. @ 2 2

E

H 0

$-.. 2 s $ Q

P g.

;

Z R

4 * m

E

DAVIDB. GOLDEYANDR.

W. JOHNWN

207

was no doubt related to the Catholic preferences of many centrist voters, more marked among women than men, and doubtless the same religious factor had some (negative) bearing on the heavily male composition of both the FN and PCF electorates. But the real puzzle lies with Mitterrand’s vote. In general, the more leftish an occupational group was, the higher the proportion of women in it voting Mitterrand-with women workers giving him a remarkable 53 per cent support even on the first round. But the converse was not always true---among such conservative groups as the retired, artisans, and small businessmen, Mitterrand supporters were more likely to be men than women, but the biggest feminine disproportion of all was reached in the (usually conservative) liberal professions and among students-from which those professionals are drawn. Given that women form 5 3 per cent of the electorate, this gender gap is now as crucial an advantage to the Socialists as it was once disadvantageous to them. The erosion of Communist support had become so standard a feature of the eiectoral scene that Lajoinie’s loss of a further one-third of its vote in just two years did not excite the comment that it would once have done. In fact such a figure somewhat exaggerated the PCF’s decline: many of the votes cast for Juquin were merely en vacance from the PCF. None the less, the ability of a dissident Communist to take such a large proportion of the Party’s vote, while the Trotskyite vote held steady, together with the fact that even Lajoinie and Juquin together were some way from equalling the PCF’s 1986 vote, showed how dire the party’s plight has now become. Not only did the party slip well below its previous alltime low (8.3% in 1932) but sheer demography makes it difficult to see how further decline can be avoided. The over 65s were almost twice as likely as the under 25s to support the party, just as men were almost twice as likely as women to do so. The PCF is becoming a party of old men and unless all recent trends are abruptly reversed the party’s death is as certain as theirs, leaving Italy as the only European country with a Communist Party which is more than a groupuscule. Already the PCF was just that in the 30 dfipartements where it scored under 5 per cent-indeed, in 16 dkpartements it suffered the humiliation of coming in behind the Ecologists (and in Paris was less than 200 votes ahead of them). In only 15 dipartements did the PCF score over IO per cent and only in Lajoinine’s own d~~a~erne~t of Allier did he win over 15 per cent. The fact that the PCF’s best dkpartement was rural Ailier, not industrial Seine-Saint-Denis was symptomatic of the fact that the party often fared better in rural and small town France than it did in the big conurbations-the PCF vote held up far better in Correze (Lajoinie’s departement of origin), Dordogne, Creuse, Ariege, and Deux-S&es than it did in the Paris region, where the collapse has been greatest and most rapid. In other large towns with Communist mayors the PCF often scored so badly as almost to stagger belief: in Le Havre, Lajoinie was under 13 per cent, in Colombes under 12 per cent, in both Le Mans and Amiens under 9 per cent, and in Thionville under 6 per cent. The only sizeable town in France where Lajoinie topped the poll was Ivry-sur-Seine (Val-de-Mame); these results suggested that the PCF was likely to be virtually annihilated at the 1989 municipal elections. The only real resource left to the PCF apart from those municipal redoubts is its control of the CGT, though in a presidential contest the union is only able to deliver to the PCF its hard-core members-who are also likely party members whom the Party would probably get anyway. The following the PCF retains is thus heavily concentrated among a small group of ageing, male industrial workers-though even so it was merely running neck and neck with Le Pen for their support, and was far behind him among younger workers: among workers aged 18-24 only 4 per cent voted PCF, compared to 23 per cent for Le Pen. Perhaps the saddest statistic of all for the party was the fact that it received less than half as many votes as Le Pen amona the unemnloved.

208

The French PresidentialElection and the General Election

The Second

Ballot

Campaign

The hapless Barre appeared with Chirac on the television the night of the poll to call on his supporters to vote for Chirac without any compromise with the National Front; Chirac accepted his support but implicitly violated its conditions. President Giscard emerged to support his former Prime Minister, though rather in the manner of giving him a lesson as to how he ought to have run his campaign. The Communists called for a vote against the right. Le Pen remained the wild card. His condition for desisting for Chirac was to appear with him on television. That would have legitimized him as part of the right and made it impossible to refuse electoral alliances at legislative and municipal level. It would also almost certainly have cost Chirac the presidency, whatever else he did. The second ballot campaign was essentially a frenetic attempt by Chirac to take both Barre and Le Pen supporters. He got precious little help from Le Pen himself, who moved the traditional extreme-right celebration of Joan of Arc’s saint’s day to the 1st of May, so that it fell between the two ballots-and competed with the traditional left wing marches. On a drizzly Sunday there was a straggle-past of FN sections in Paris and the provinces, ‘a traditional Latin mass in the Tuileries, and then the candidate’s speech. Dismissing Chirac as the ‘residual’ candidate of the right, he insisted that no FN vote would go to Mitterrand, but understood that some of his supporters might not be able to bring themselves to vote for Chirac. He treated Chirac in effect, as Chirac had dealt with Giscard between the two rounds in 1981, though more brutally. The divisions within the conservative camp now became painfully manifest, with both RPR and UDF publicly divided o- _how and how far to appeal to the FN vote. As the polls showed a large proportion of FN voters unwilling to vote for Chirac, his campaign became more frantic, thus justifying the image the Socialists had been constructing for him throughout the campaign. The last week saw a climax of ill-considered activity. Pasqua announced that RPR and FN shared the same values; the French hostages held in Lebanon were sprung; one of the Greenpeace agents was flown back from her Pacific atoll exile; a Canadian fishing boat was taken in the disputed waters around St Pierre et Miquelon; and finally the gendarmes held hostage by New Caledonian autonomists were rescued with the loss of 2 1 lives. It was a full menu for the last three days of a campaign, and it may have brought Chirac an extra 2 per cent of the vote, mostly from Le Pen (who had called for the ‘extermination’ of the Melanesian rebels).’ But it was at the price of confirming those who doubted Chirac was a statesman in their view, and it allowed Mitterrand to play his favourite role as the good grey judge above the fray, la force tranquille. Mitterrand’s problem was, in any case, less difficult. The mask fell only once, in the traditional between ballots television debate between the two remaining candidates-which had no perceptible effect on the outcome. His second ballot strategy was implicit in his first round campaign: the uniter of the French people, the President who brought the centre to the left. In short, he was after the Barre vote, not only for the presidential run-off but for the general election that was more than likely to follow his re-election. In the event, he owed his substantial margin of victory to the indiscipline of Le Pen’s troops, and the misreading of his second ballot triumph cost his party a majority in the following general election.

Second

Ballot

Results

On paper more than 1.05 million extra voters turned out on the second round, helping to give Mitterrand 54.01 per cent of the vote and the biggest winning margin since de Gaulle’s

209

DAVIDB. CXx..myANDR. W. JOHNSON

1965 victory. In fact 12 per cent of first round voters had told the pollsters they intended to abstain: if they all really did so then there must actually have been nearly 4.8 million new voters at the second ballot. In practice no doubt many intended abstainers were ultimately pressured into voting but a modest guestimate would be that a remarkable 3.5 million new voters turned out for the decisive ballot, a figure which should be set alongside Mi~errand’s winning margin of just under 2.5 million votes. Almost as remarkable was the fact that over 1.16 million voters (3.65%) spoiit their ballots, almost double the number who did so on the first round and almost 50 per cent more than on the 198 1 second ballot. What is not in doubt is that both the higher turnout and the spoilt ballots hurt Chirac: first round abstainers voted for Mitterrand by a 65:35 margin and spoilt ballots reached their highest levels in Le Pen strongholds, suggesting that these were votes lost primarily by the right. TAB= 4. Transfer of votes on second ballot by first ballot preference 1st round vote for: Boussel + Laguiller + Juquin Lajoinie Mitterrand Waechter Barre Chirac Le Pen 1st round abstainers

Mitterrand $1 ;: 79 14 3 ;;

Source: BulliBVA Exit poll, Le Monde, ‘L’Ektion

Chirac 9 7 1 2 97 74 35

Pr&sidentielle’, 1988.

But, as Table 4 suggests, many more Le Pen supporters voted for Mitterrand on the second round; indeed they were considerably more likely than Barristes to do so. If one examines the Le Pen voters who voted for Mitterrand on the second ballot one finds that they were more likely than the average Le Pen voter to be male, even more likely to be young, and most likely of all to be working class: that is, Mitterr~d did best among the traditional left-wing categories. The same pattern of young, male, working class defections was evident among Barristes switching to Mitterrand at the second ballot, except that here white collar workers were also more likely than average to desert the right. The resulting overall composition of the Chirac and Mitterrand electorates may be seen in Table 5. The ~spro~~onately male defections to Mitterrand from both the Barriste and Le Pen electorates, together with the fact that the Communist vote-which went monolithically for Mitterrand-was also heavily male, meant that there was a maie:female disproportion of 23: 17 among the new Mitterr~d voters at the second ballot, exactly evening up the balance of the sexes in the two electorates (see Table 5). This was the first time in Mitterrand’s four presidential elections that a majority of women have voted for him though, as Table 6 shows, had the ballot been restricted to men he would have beaten de Gaulle in 1965 and won every election since. Thus while there has been no real trend towards the left among men-and Mitterrand actually lost significant ground among male voters in 1988--&e proportion of women voting left has increased quite steadily since 1965 and by an amazing 38 per cent overall. To a considerable extent this is due to secularization, which has greatly depleted the (heavily feminine) ranks of regularly practising Catholics: only 11 per cent of the population now goes to Church once a month or more, and only another 12 per cent go once a year or more.

2 10

The French Presidentiul Election and the General Election

TABLE 5. Analysis of second ballot electorates by candidate, sex, age, profession, sector and religious practice Mitterrand

Chirac

Total

54

46

Sex Men Women

54 54

46 46

Age 18-24 25-34 35-49 50-64 65 and over

56 65 57 46 43

44 35 43 54 57

29 37 42 46

71 63 58 54

70 58 60 58 74 74

30 42 40 42 26 26

74

26

:: 62 46

:: 38 54

33

67 44 26 31

Profession Peasants Small business, artisans Liberal professions Upper management Teachers, social and health auxiliary workers Junior managers Office workers Shop workers Industrial workers Low paid unskilled Sector Public Private Self-employed Unemployed Housewives and retired Religion Practising Catholic Non-practising Catholic No religion Other religion

56 74 69

Source: BulliBVA Exit poll, 0 Monde, ‘L’Election Presidentielle’, 1988.

In addition, devout Catholics were noticeably less solid for the Right in the face of the more moderate Mitterrand of 1988: at the second ballot only 67 per cent of the regularly practising voted for Chirac and 33 per cent for Mitterrand. While this 2: 1 split attests to the continuing power of the religious cleavage, it must be compared with a far more extreme bias even in the recent past: in 1965 only 8 per cent of the regularly practising voted for the left at the first ballot and even in 1986 only 26 per cent of those who attended Church once a month voted for the Left, as did only 17 per cent of the weekly practising. This reduction in both the scale and intensity of the religious cleavage leaves class, however loosely, as the principal cleavage line: class was the principal source of differentiation in pushing Barriste and Le Pen voters towards Mitterrand in the end so that whereas 67 per cent of workers voted for the Left on the first ballot, 74 per cent did so at the second. Such numbers are close

DAVID B. GOLDEY

ANDR. W. JOHNKIN

211

TABLE 6. Percentage of men and women voting for Mitterrand at presidential second ballots, 1965 - 1988 Year

Men

Women

Difference

1965 1974 1981 1988

51 53 56 54

39 t;

12 7 7 -

54

to the left’s high-water mark of 1977. What was new in 1988 was that Mitterrand, while keeping virtually the whole of his more proletarian electorate of 198 1, this time added a very considerable margin of support from the middle classes: 42 per cent of liberal professionals and 46 per cent of senior managers voted for him on the second round. These gains among hitherto conservative groups saw a major change in the geography of Mitterrand’s support. Essentially, the Socialists have for some while been steadily losing ground in their oldproven& strongholds while making even larger gains north of the Loire, particularly in the traditionally conservative east and west. In 1988 Le Pen’s gains in the south, especially the south-east, carried this process a long stage further. In the south-west Mitterrand’s vote held up, but his really large gains came in Nord and Pas-de-Calais (thanks to landslide gains from the Communists) and in the Catholic west and east (especially Alsace). In the western dbfatiement of Sarthe, for example, where the Socialists and Communists together had gained only 44.2 per cent of the vote in 1986, Mitterrand received a stunning 57.9 per cent. It was the same story in both Alsatian dipartements in the east. Mitterrand has made extraordinary progress in what were once merely terres de mission for the Socialists: in Bas-Rhin his second ballot scores have gone from 20 per cent in 1965, to 33 per cent in 1974, to 35 per cent in 1981 and to 48.4 per cent in 1988; he carried Haut-Rhin for the Left in 1988 for the first time since the War. These remarkable results for Mitterrand in Alsace were achieved on the back of first round scores of over 20 per cent for Le Pen in both Alsatian dbpartements, providing a striking example of Mitterrando-Lepenisme, as it was called. Prior to the election the polls had been showing a steady majority for the right-in January, for example, BVA showed the right with a 53.5:42 majority over the left, and even the last published pre-election polls were showing a right lead of around 52:45 (the remainder being Ecologists). But the same polls were, even at the end of the campaign, finding only half as many voters openly saying they would vote for Le Pen as actually did so-and up to half of those were planning to abstain, spoil their ballot or vote for Mitterrand at the second ballot. That is, many had clearly already made the double choice of Le Pen and Mitterrand long before polling day, while others may well have done so but were disguising their real intentions from the pollsters. Similarly, the fall in Mitterrand’s vote in the closing days of the campaign from its near-40 per cent level to 34 per cent was largely due to a last-minute movement of Socialist voters to Le Pen. Such voters were able to indulge their preference for Le Pen safe in the knowledge that they could still vote for Mitterrand at the second ballot. Here, too, then, were voters making the double choice of Le Pen and Mitterrand. Pol!sters naturally counted all Le Pen voters as part of the Right, but in terms of the tour d&i.+ this was probably never really accurate .8 Exit polls showed that no less than 44 per cent of Le Pen’s voters, even as they voted for him for president, were planning to desert him at the next parliamentary elections-22 per cent to the RPR, 11 per cent to the PS, 5 per cent to the UDF, 3 per cent to the PCF, 2 per cent to the Ecologists and 1 per cent to the

212

The French

Presider&l

Election and the General Election

Trotskyites. Thanks to such transfers, the same polls credited the FN with only 9 per cent of the vote in a general election and the left with a 48.5:46.5 per cent majority. Given that Ecologist votes now break 4:l to the left, this really meant a 52.5:47.5 per cent left majority, even before one allowed for the inevitable defections from the right of some FN voters at the second ballot. Thus Mitterrand’s coat-tails seemed long enough to reverse the overall right-left balance within the electorate-but this achievement was due in no small part to the phenomenon of the Mitterrando-Lepenistes. Many of these latter were workers who had defected to Le Pen from the left in 1982-86 or, in the case of the very young who had not voted before, from left families and milieux. After this peregrination to the fringes of the far right such voters ‘homed’ back to Mitterrand on the second ballot. Their chief characteristic was that, contrary to the electorate as a whole who thought Chirac would deal better than Mitterrand with unemployment, they gave Mitterrand a 6: 1 edge on this issue. Quite clearly, the fate both of Le Pen and the PS depended quite heavily on how this group behaved at the legislative elections which surprisingly few journalists and politicians-but all serious political analysts-were sure would follow. Dissolution of the Assembly A persistent theme of Mitterrand’s presidential campaign had been his intention to open his government and his parliamentary majority to centrists anxious to prepare France for the open European market of 1992 and who rejected Le Pen. The idea was repeated-against protests from his audiences-at his big public rallies, and repeatedly in private, so that it might be retailed in the press and in political circles. Since September he had talked as if he intended to try and break the right wing majority in the Assembly, by cutting in the leaders of the CDS, and assorted Barristes. The talk was certainly meant to undermine Barre on the first ballot and Chirac on the second; it probably was also intended to create an opportunity for the President should he win by only a very narrow margin. But as the election approached, Mitterrand made it plain to those paying attention that he did not feel obliged to have his prime minister actually go before the Assembly. If it appeared to him that the present Assembly would not provide his government with a stable majority on the basis of his platform, then he would dissolve, and try to enlarge his majority at the polls and then in the formation of the government that followed the election. The manoeuvre was already becoming too complicated for public opinion to follow. In the event, he was certain to dissolve, first because with 54 per cent of the vote it seemed impossible that the PS would not win a majority in the Assembly; second, because that prospect made the party very unwilling to experiment with a coalition government that depended on an Assembly with a hostile majority. The tensions in the party had been contained during the election, but they were there none the less; Mitterrand no longer dominated the PS as completely as he had before 1986, as the election of Pierre Mauroy against Laurent Fabius as new First Secretary showed. Finally, Mitterrand had no interest either in being held hostage by the centrists; his notion of an alliance was not that of one between equals, but one which he dominated. That left him to play a very complicated game, for a general election would reinforce the polarizing tendencies in French politics, making ouverlure more difficult. It would push the CDS towards its present RPR and UDF allies to hold seats under the two-ballot single member majority system, while Socialists and Communists would stand down for each other on the run-off as they had done since 1962. Worse still Mitterrand appears to have attempted to use a Fifth Republic general election for a parliamentary manoeuvre charac-

DAVID B. G~LDEY AND R. W. JOHNXIN

213

teristic of the Fourth. What he set out to do was elect some 30 members who were not part of the PS, but would be elected by its supporters (and Communist votes as well). This group of Progressive Democrats could then be used, in the worst of circumstances as a simulacrum for an ally, but more likely as a home for disillusioned Barristes and Centrists, looking to escape from the right and the incubus of the National Front. In other words, he was looking to re-create something like his old Fourth Republican party, the UDSR. That was a dangerous mixing of genres. As the television on the night of the first ballots had been dominated by the National Front, on the second it was dominated by spokesmen for the Centrists and the Socialists. From his reception at PS headquarters it seemed clear that Michel Rocard, an advocate of consensus government and an opening of the majority, was going to be named prime minister. But the television debates between Centrists and Socialists were not very promising, for the PS leaders clearly hoped for a dissolution while the Centrists certainly did not. Mitterrand had already prepared the entry of two old Radical senatorial cronies, Michel Durafour and Jacques Pelletier; there were extended conversations also with Simone Veil and Jean-Pierre Soissons, a founding member of Giscard’s PR. But CDS leaders talked of waiting until September-and were never offered enough to tempt them from their perches on the fence, while Giscard made it clear he favoured an opening controlled by him and lasting at his pleasure. Rocard was officially named prime minister on 10 May, and his government announced on 13 May. From it, it was clear dissolution was to follow; in it were the two senators-with nothing to fear from a dissolution-Lionel Stoleru, a former minister of Giscard, who had supported Barre on the first ballot and Mitterrand on the second; and 10 other non-socialists, including the 1981 Ecologist presidential candidate, Brice Lalonde. Not only was there little to show for owertwe, but Interior, Finance, and Foreign Affairs went to their 1984-86 Socialist incumbents, while the government contained representatives of all the currents in the PS, including those most hostile to an opening to the centre. There was thus enough to upset those on the left of the party-and to confii PCF Philippics against the PS-but not enough to satisfy more moderate socialists, or more imnnftantlv. Chtfist wmnnftcfs -‘_r-_‘___‘_I, - _-___-__ _-TT-_ ____w_h_n* vnt_ps L_lp PS ne&d_ on &f s=ond ba!!nt if it ~prp to echo Mitterrand’s second ballot triumph.

Candidatures Centrist leaders still seemed unwilling to believe that Mitterrand would dissolve. They were offered some 50 seats without PS opponents, but refused because they did not believe Mitterrand would dissolve, and in any case thought-almost certainly rightly-that neither their own, nor Socialist voters, would wear it. The 14 May, the dissolution was announced, and the CDS rejoined its family, the UDF and allied to the RPR for the election, on the basis that sitting members (elected in 1986 on dciflartementulproportional representation) would choose their own seats, and other seats wouid ‘be divided ‘between the parties of the conservative coalition to avoid being overtaken by the National Front and the problems arising from the need to transfer support between candidates from one ballot to the other that had caused ‘the right trouble in parliamentary and presidential elections over the previous fifteen years. RPR and UDF candidates were thus usually incumbents or local notables, running under the portmanteau URC label. Le Pen denounced the alliance as declaration of war against him, but he was clearly caught unawares by the dissolution. Unlike 1981, when the FN had carefully trawled for respectable local notables as candidates, this time Le Pen had to fall back on little known

214

The French Presidential Election and the General Election

local activists, isolated by their own extremism, or denizens of chateaux with social pretentions but no remaining social influence. Otherwise, the leadership of the movement, headed by Le Pen made a Gadarene rush for Bouches-du-Rhone, the seats where Le Pen had had his best first ballot results, in and around Marseilles (but which Mitterrand had carried on the second ballot). Although FN candidates ran under a label cleverly designed to give the acronym, Le Pen, the campaign was short of steam. His presidential posters reappeared in the last week of the first ballot race in a desperate attempt to restart the presidential bandwagon, but to no avail. The FN suffered from its lack of a large number of long-established local government worthies. Not so, the PCF. In 1986 the party had often headed its lists with little known but orthodox federal secretaries; now, it ran incumbents-even those at odds with the partydeputies, mayors, even senators. In some seats. the mayor of one town served as suppl&znt for mayor of another. Where the candidates had no chance-as in most of Paris-they ran clearly as nominees of the party, with a great big hammer and sickle on their posters. But where there was a local notable standing with a chance of election, it was hard to tell which party he represented. His posters were not red, they bore no mention of the PCF, and the candidate ran as the incumbent (sometimes even when he was not) or local mayor often as the ‘candidate of the left’. The party went into the campaign prepared to lose almost all its seats, hoping to save a dozen. It put all its effort in those safe, left wing seats where it might hope to come ahead of the PS on the first round. Made over-confident by Mitterrand’s 54 per cent, too concerned with its own internal balance, the PS contributed to the success of the Communist strategy, costing itself a parliamentary majority in the process. With a famous victory seemingly certain, there was acute pressure on PS nominations, especially in notionally winnable seats. Firstly, Mitterrand (and Rocard, to a much lesser extent) looked to elect former Giscardians, Centrists and non-socialists for his swing group in the new Assembly; but he also wanted to place a new generation of sabras, who had made their names in SOS-Rucisme or as Trotskyite leaders of the student movement of 1986. All these had to be found notionally safe left wing constituencies, when electoral logic dictated that ex-centrists might do better in marginal right wing constituencies and that former Trots were unlikely to appeal to PS or even to ex-Communist voters in the working class districts around Paris or in the industrial north and east. The President was able to impose that much on a reluctant party along with several of his former Elysee staff, out to make new political careers for themselves. But the party also had its own internal balance to maintain, as the election of Mauroy had indicated. So seats had also to be found for representatives of the different factions in the party. And all of these Paris-concocted arrangements had then to be sold to reluctant local sections, which had often already designated their own candidates, often popular local figures with a substantial local following. Sometimes the local section protested but went along, if unenthusiastically; sometimes it backed a popular local Communist mayor in whose council it was represented; sometimes it backed its own nominee, who refused to stand down for the Parisian parachutk. Whatever the case, there were a good ten seats where an ill-chosen Socialist or PS-backed interloper came behind a popular local Communist. The First Ballot

Campaign

The general election campaign was very much an anti-climax. Voters and politicians were both suffering from battle fatigue, even though the campaign was mercifully brief-a further advantage to notables and incumbents and another handicap for carpetbaggers. Time and money were too short for the Trotskyites or Ecologists to field any serious number of

DAVID B. G~LDEY AND R.

W. JOHNSON

215

candidates. An indication of the state of mind of the electorate was that no party was able to fill the largest halls or stadiums in large towns. Another was that the official campaign setpieces on television were hardly watched at all. Instead, the young watched a rather vulgar put-down of the sacred eight o’clock news and comment programmes called ‘Les Nuls’ (The Nothings) and everybody watched the &bite Show, puppets modelled on ‘The Muppets’, but with the caricatured features and voices of political leaders (Mitterrand as a frog called Dieu, Rocard as a crow, Barre as a distracted teddy bear, Marchais as Miss Piggy, and Le Pen as a blond vampire in a Breton bonnet). These were indications that the general fed-upness with politicians that had served the clown Coluche in 1981, and to some extent was represented by Le Pen, was still there to be exploited. That feeling was no doubt strong on the right, which had just lost a presidential contest to a man who, four years previously, had been the most unpopular President of the Fifth Republic, and whose party had been defeated in 1986. The right found itself running, as in 1986, in favour of cohabitation. But disillusion was also felt around the Socialists, where the botched opening to the centre had offended the left without mollifying the centre. Mitterrand further complicated the task for his party, and for his Prime Minister, who exhausted himself crisscrossing the country holding meetings. The President held himself aloof from the campaign, remarking only that it was ‘not healthy’ for one party to have a majority and to govern alone. When, the week between the ballots, it became clear that the Socialists might not in fact win that unhealthy majority, he went on television to call for the victory he had previously apparently eschewed. But the signals were crossed and the change came too late.

The First Ballot

Results

The first ballot turnout of 66.16 per cent on 5 June was the lowest for any parliamentary election in French history; the only previous occasion with participation under 70 per cent was in 1962 (68.6%), after the 1962 referendum on direct election of the President. It was immediately apparent that the left had fallen a long way short of repeating its 1981 landslide. The PCF was down 4.98 per cent from its 1981 level; the far left 1.01 per cent and the Ecologists, who had 1.09 per cent in 1981, were unrepresented this time. The PS and the other fragments of the non-Communist left had received 38.34 per cent in 1981, giving the left 55.79 per cent overall, or 56.88 per cent if the Ecologists were included. In 1988 the left had only 49.16 per cent at the first ballot. The fact that the PS had now scored over 30 per cent for the third consecutive time in parliamentary elections-a level Socialists only dreamed of before 198 l-was virtually disregarded amidst the stunned realization that the President’s decision not to mobilize his supporters in the usual bipolar crusade had largely undermined the coat-tails effect. Instead, the URC, acting almost as a single party, was comfortably ahead both of the PS and also of Chirac and Barre’s combined scores. The effects of Pasqua’s redistricting were perceptible in the first round results: 73 of the 111 deputies elected on the first round in metropolitan France were from the right, 35 RPR, 16 CDS, 15 PR, and 7 other UDF; 36 PS and 2 MRG deputies-and for the first time since 1958, no Communists at all-were similarly elected, though after the normal withdrawals had taken place ten Communists found themselves unopposed at the second ballot, as did seven Socialists. Some prominent local Socialists were in trouble because of boundary changes. Ominously for the left, no less than 14 deputies of the right were re-elected at the first ballot despite the fact that Mitterrand had carried their constituencies on 8 May: that is, despite the competition they faced from the FN (and sometimes other right-wingers too), they outpolled what Chirac had been able to achieve even without such competition-and often by margins of 10 per cent. This emphasized yet again how poorly served the right had

216

The French Presidential Election and the General Election

been by Chirac as its second ballot candidate-especially since these triumphant fourteen included only four RPRs. But other patterns were apparent too. On the one hand Mitterrand’s strategy of ouverture had confused (and sometimes dismayed) his own troops, while the parties of the right were still reeling from their defeats of 24 April and 8 May. The result was the virtual paralysis of the partisan forces which would normally have dominated such an election; where there should have been a tidal wave there was a stagnant pool, and voters plumped heavily for notables of all parties. This was evident not only on the right but in the way Socialist notables like Fabius and Chevenement ran far ahead of Mitterrand’s score in their constituencies; in the way PCF mayors doubled the vote Lajoinie had received in their seats: in the way the UDF, strong in notables but weak in organization, outperformed the RPR: and even in the way that Chirac was triumphantly re-elected in Ussel, for when his voters had to vote for him as a local notable they gave him 13 per cent more of the vote than they had when he had run for president. The failure of the PS to capitalize on Mitterrand’s coat-tails was reflected in the way the right surged back in Catholic areas and at the expense of the FN: quite clearly the PS had failed to hold the President’s gains among practising Catholics and the MitterrandoLepenistes. Moreover, exit polls showed that, in contrast to the presidential election, women had voted more conservatively than men this time: a clear reflection both of abstentions among Socialist women and defections back to the right among the Church-going. All told, only 104 PS candidates (18% of the total) overtook Mitterrand’s first ballot score in their constituencies. Moreover, the right achieved far greater unity in the parliamentary than in the presidential contest: the generalization of single URC candidacies was effective because there was no constituency-level parallel to the Barriste defections to Mitterrand. A natural corollary to the preference for notables was the merciless punishment voters dealt out to ca~tbaggers-pa~icularly numerous on PS tickets. Four of these, parachuted into Communist-held seats, were utterly trounced by popular PCF deputies on the first ballot: presidential staffer Jean-Claude Colliard in La Ciotat; ambassador Pierre Guidoni in SaintQuentin; the non-Socialist Minister, Bernard Kouchner in the Nord, and Fabius’s protege, former Trotskyite Henri Weber, and MRG Minister, Francois Doubin, both in Seine-SaintDenis. Given that the election had seen Le Pen lose a whole third of his presidential vote in just six weeks, there was a somewhat wishful tendency on the part of some commentators to believe that things were even worse than they really were for the FN. Le horde offered a prime example with an article which claimed that there was an inverse correlation between abstention and FN support: in the twentydbpurtements with the highest turnout the FN was almost always below its national average score and in the twenty with the lowest turnout the FN was above its national average. The implication was that only the record low turnout had disguised a far greater real fall in FN support than mere percentages could show. In fact the article (which was immediately and happily picked up by the international press) simply failed to notice that abstention was highest in the north and east (where the FN is strongest) and lowest in the west, centre and south west (where the FN is weakest). Not only were the abstention figures from the north and east strongly suggestive of FN abstention, but, of course, in those areas the FN would have been far above its average level whatever had happened to turnout. Detailed examination of bureaux de vote figures and polling data confirmed the impression that Le Pen’s voters had indeed been among those most likely to abstain and that all that had really happened was that the FN, with 9.65 per cent, had roughly maintained its 1986 level of 9.87 per cent. 9 Thus the real phenomenon was the FN’s stability despite Le Pen’s remarkable presidential score. But the changed electoral

DAVIDB. GOLDEYANDR. W. JOHNSON

217

TABLE 7. Sociology of the second ballot vote, 12 June 1988

Left

Right

Total

54 51

46 49

100 100

54 61 54 47 48

46 39 46 53 52

100 100 100 100 100

68 63 60 65 36 42 31 42 :f: 46

100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

77 66 43 31 20

100 100 100 100 100

10

100 100 100

Sex

Men Women Age 18-24 25-34 35-45 50-64 65 and over Profession Peasants Employers Senior managers Liberal professions Teachers White collar workers Industrial workers

40 35 64 2; 58 46 47 54

Unemployed Students Housewives Retired Religion Regularly practising RC Irregularly practising RC Non-practising RC other religion No religion

:: 57 69 80

Position CenUt+ft Centre Cenueright

90 29 2

Source: CSA exit poll. R. Cayrol, ‘Gauche, clroite et tentation ctntriste’, Le Journal ah Elections, No. 3, June 1988, p. 9.

system had done its work: although the FN was in a position to play a spoiling role in a number of cases, it came ahead of the right in only nine seats in Bouches-du-Rhone and one in Var. In only two cases did FN candidates improve on Le Pen’s presidential score in their constituencies-Le Pen himself and the FN’s Marseilles leader, Pascal Arrighi: another demonstration of the power of notability. Elsewhere, the 12% per cent of the register qualifying minimum for the second ballot and high abstentions, simply eliminated most PN candidates from the run-off without any need of concessions from the leaders of the URC.

The Second

Ballot

Campaign

The closer than expected first ballot result created a little suspense but electors still had to work with the surveys and simulations in seats of a fortnight before, when the PS bandwagon had not yet rolled to a stop. The pollsters themselves were much more cautious, and

218

The French Presidential Election and the General Election

most reckoned the second ballot was likely to be too close to call. 10Attention turned, for the first time since the start of the eiectoral season to the PCF, which initially threatened to support none of the PS-supported o~uey~~ye candidates, and ended by notionally desisting for some. In fact, the party had done better than expected on the first round, and did not wish to jeopardize seats it could only win with Socialist votes. But it clearly also would do its best to prevent the PS winning a majority by itself, where that could be done discreetly. The National Front also re-emerged, but this time behaving in a much more gentlemanly manner, for the first time since the beginning of the campaigns. Its vote back to its 1986 level, with an electoral system introduced partly to defeat it, it had lost most of its capacity to blackmail through the operation of the 12% per cent rule. But its leaders might be elected in and around MarseiIles if it could strike a deal there; since URC candidates in the area needed FN votes for their own election, including Jean-Claude Gaudin, chairman of the UDF parliamentary party, an agreement was possible. Nationally, UDF and RPR leaders pretended that there was no agreement with the FN, or that it was purely a local arrangement, unsanctioned by national headquarters. By a convenient coincidence, however, all but four of the remaining FN candidates stood down, usually in favour of the leading candidate of the right. Barre announced he was ‘distressed’ by the agreement and Simone Veil. who had survived a Nazi concentration camp, clearly was so. But most URC voters were unconcerned. In most seats winnable by the right, the candidate was a respectable local URC worthy; in areas where the FN had been running strongly, around Paris, along the Mediterranean and in the north, local RPR and UDF leaders had often stolen its clothes and were strong on law and order. The PCF owed its sharp recovery principally to its municipal notables: in areas such as Seine-Saint-Denis, where it is well dug in, its candidates frequently improved by a whole 50 per cent on Lajoinie’s showing. But the PCF vote rose everywhere, even in hopeless seats, so that even on a far lower turnout the party added 650,000 votes to Lajoinie’s score and improved sharply on its 1986 performance almost everywhere. This unexpected revival was, of course, received by the PCF leadership as a vindication of its sectarian line-a serious mis-reading of the popular mood. The power of notability apart, many left voters feared that the PCF was on the verge of disappearance if they did not rally to it in its hour of need. Some Socialists felt mildly guilty at the way the Union of the Left had eviscerated the PCF; strongly unitary in spirit and keen to see the PS stay anchored to the left, they decided to vote PCF to show their discontent at the projected revival of the Third Force, particularly where Paris had parachuted a non-Socialist or a virtual unknown Iocally, against the wishes of the PS section. But the PCF’s revival was far from sufficient to compensate for the effects of the electoral system. Three of their sitting deputies failed even to achieve the 12.5 per cent of the registered ballot and sixteen others-including such major Politburo figures as Roland Leroy and Maxime Gremetz and the ex-Ministers, Marcel Rigout and Charles Fitermanwere overtaken by PS rivals, in whose favour they had to withdraw for the second ballot. In only 72 of the 555 me~o~litan constituencies did the PCF achieve the 12.5 per cent required legally to qualify for the second ballot and after withdrawals the party found itself fighting just 26 seats, including a purely symbolic contest at Saint-Etienne where the PCF refused to stand down for the Radical supported by the PS. Thus the party, which had entered the election with deputies from 24 out of 96 metropolitan dbpartements, saw itself lose its representation in eleven of them-including industrial Pas-de-calais, Thorez’s original political base. In Vitry-the only constituency carried by Lajoinie against Mitterr~d-be PCF candidate was easily overtaken by his PS rival: a result which merely strengthened rumours of electoral fraud at the presidential ballot.

DAVIDB. G~LDEYANDR. W. JOHNSON

The Second

Ballot

219

Results

Despite all the efforts of the politicians, participation at the second ballot, at 70.22 per cent, was also a record low. The extra 4 per cent turnout helped the left marginally-but not enough to provide Mitterrand with the overall PS majority he had too easily taken for granted. The PS had only 269 seats (277 with Overseas France), the PCF 24 (27), the UDF 127 (130), the RPR 122 (128), Other Right 12 (14) and the FN just 1. The PCF, while losing eight seats, found, to its unbridled delight, that it held the balance of power. Within the PS, despite its 62 gains, the excuses-and accusations-began. Losing PS candidates blamed Pasqua for the way in which the left fell agonizingly short in so many constituencies-in 34 seats the PS lost with over 49 per cent of the vote (and with over 49.5 % in 15 of them). But the PS also won 30 seats with scores of less than 5 1 per cent and the (artificially constructed) tour &cisif showed the left at only 50.7 per cent, a figure which the combined PS and PCF total of 293 seats out of 555 seemed to reflect fairly enough. There had been gerrymandering against the left. More significant was the fact that, as on the first ballot, many Mitterrand voters simply stayed home: there were 103 constituencies which Mitterrand had carried at the second ballot which the PS failed to win on 12 June, and only 8 cases of the contrary. The PS lost more seats at the second ballot-as at the first-through unwise candidacies. Its strategy was, indeed, self-contradictory: candidates without local popularity need strong coat-tails to get elected-not a President who over-confidently squanders his coat-tail effect. In Is&e the voters clearly took a dim view of the fact that the PS should again be represented by Christian Nucci, the former minister tainted with the Gzrrefour du Dkveloppement scandal: he trailed in miles behind in a seat Mitterrand had easily carried. The PS decision to back a dissident CDS rather than run their own candidate in Bayeux backfired badly: far from adding centrist votes to left ones, the CDS lost, running 11 per cent behind what Mitterrand had achieved on his own. The same thing happened to the PS-supported centrist minister, Thierry de Beau&, in Seine-et-Mame. Both defeats apparently resulted from PCF opposition to these ‘men of the Right’, but next door to Beau& the Ecologist leader, Brice Lalonde, now Minister for the Environment and supported by the PS, also went down to defeat despite the PCF’s official support. At Compiegne (Oise) where the PS supported Giscard’s former minister, Lionel Stoleru, as a gesture towards ouverture, Stoleru held the seat with a majority much reduced by PCF opposition. At Tarbes (Hautes-Pyre&es) the imposition of Mitterrand’s chef de cabinet, Jean Glavany, as the PS candidate led to a split in the local party, a dissident Socialist winning the seat with PCF support and Glavany trailing in third. Another presidential assistant, S(rgol&ne Royal, scraped in by the skin of her teeth in what should have been a I’S safe seat in Deux-S&es. In Moselle the PS had a major coup and a disaster: at Sarrebourg, by supporting a dissident CDS it helped defeat the former Gaullist prime minister, Pierre Messmer; at Rombas it unwisely imposed the former Paris PCF leader, Henri Fiszbin, as its candidate and watched him lose heavily in a seat Mitterrand had won with over 60 per cent of the vote. An equally unwiseparachutuge led to the former student leader, Isabelle Thomas, losing a perfectly winnable seat for the PS in Seine-SaintDenis. In Essonne another parachuted minister, Roger Bambuck, also lost, as did two more parachuted ouverture candidates in Val d’Oise. The press made much of Bernard Tapie, the charismatic millionaire supported by the PS, failing to win in Marseilles (whose football club he owns). But the real surprise was that he had run at all in a seat which even Mitterrand had failed to carry. Tapie took little comfort in having actually exceeded Mitterrand’s score: he was most unused to losing at anythingand showed it. True to the law which holds that women candidates get squeezed out in any

220

The French Presidential Election and the General Election

change in the electoral system, the PS minister, Georgina Dufoix-often mentioned as the sole feminine Socialistpresidentiable-ended up fighting a Nimes seat Mitterrand had failed to carry. She lost badly. There were no such second ballot dramas for the PCF: the seats they now hold are extremely safe. Moreover-and somewhat ironically-the willingness of Socialist voters to vote PCF at the second ballot had never been greater: while the Union of the Left may be dead at elite, parliamentary level, at grass roots its logic is still strengthening. Indeed, some PCF candidates even came close to equalling Mitterrand’s second ballot score in their constituencies-something not even many Socialists managed. The contrast with Lajoinie’s dismal performance was sometimes very stark: at Saint-Quentin (Aisne), for example, Lajoinie had achieved under 11 per cent and Mitterrand over 39 per cent. The popular former PCF mayor, incumbent deputy Daniel Le Meur, beat his carpetbagger PS rival on the first round and roared home on the second with 58.8 per cent of the vote. But the record was achieved by Georges Marchais in Villejuif (Val-de-Mame): on the second ballot he actually ran ahead of Mitterrand’s second ballot score there. (Numerous recent Communist convictions for electoral fraud throw a certain aura of incredibility over that result.)

The National

Front

Between the ballots the media focused heavily on the prospects of the National Front in Marseilles and the deal with Gaudin. In the event the FN’s only success came not in Bouches-du-Rhone, but in Var, thanks, ironically for such a macho party, to Mme Yann Piat, a god-daughter of Le Pen in La Vallette-du-Var. In Marseilles the FN came desperately close-three of its candidates achieved over 47 per cent of the vote on the second ballot and one, Jean Roussel, lost by just 317 votes. Le Pen had wagered 10,000 fr. against the director of the BVA polling organization whose survey had showed him easily defeated, but the poll proved quite correct: Le Pen trailed in 13 per cent behind his PS opponent. Le Pen’s campaign director, Bruno Megret, and the FN’s secretary-general, Jean-Pierre Stirbois, both would-be parachutees into Marseilles seats, were heavily defeated too. The FN could, indeed, prove to be the unlikely saviour of the PS in Marseilles at the 1989 municipal elections, for faced with FN opponents on the second ballot in 1988 Socialist candidates found it easy enough to beat even Mitterrand’s score in their seats. Indeed, this feat was achieved by three Communists as well-the extreme case being at Aubagne (La Ciotat) where the PCF won a seat easily carried by Chirac on 8 May. There were, however, crumbs of future comfort in defeat for the FN. The proportion of URC voters willing to vote FN at the second ballot varied between 63 per cent and 86 per cent, with an average of around 72 per cent in the Bouches-du-Rhone seats. Such figures are already comparable to the proportion of PS voters willing to vote PCF at the second ballot-a figure achieved by the left only after nearly a quarter century of co-operation, and they suggest that the FN has, in this key dbpartement, achieved a considerable degree of popular legitimacy. But the Front’s leaders had made a tremendous mistake in choosing to run simply where Le Pen’s vote had been highest, for these were always working class areaswhich were, in the end, inevitably won by the left. To stand any chance of winning an FN candidate really needed not only to beat the URC candidate on the first ballot, but to be in a seat with a large enough right wing majority to be able to afford the inevitable fringe of centrist defections to the left at the second ballot. This was exactly the circumstance which allowed Mme Piat’s election in Var-together with the public support of the UDF’s d@artemental leader, Maurice Arreckx. The Front also showed its power to punish its particular enemies. In Mulhouse it helped

DAVID B. GOLDEY AND

W. JOHNSON

defeat the liberal UDF Jewish mayor. At Vichy it threw its weight hard against one of its b&es n&-es, the liberal young PR minister, Claude Malhuret, and helped a Socialist come from a long way behind to win. At Voiron (Is&e), the FN took similarly successful aim at the liberal RPR, Michel Hannoun, author of a report on racism in France; Hannoun lost by 602-with 1,460 spoilt ballots. At the symbolic town of Dreux (Eure-et-Loire) where sensational elections in 1982 and 1983 helped give the FN its start, the FN completed its demolition of the outspokenly liberal Socialist, Mme Francoise Gaspard, helping the RPR to take her seat as before they had captured her maiti. Elsewhere, the Front was far less successful. It maintained its candidate into the second ballot against L&ard at Frejus (Var), only to see the PR leader comfortably re-elected. At Epemay (Mame) it could not prevent its voters swinging en bloc to elect the liberal CDS, Bernard Stasi-perhaps the Front’s favourite liberal aunt sally-in a seat he might have expected to lose, nor could it defeat its RPR opponents, Philippe Seguin in Epinal and Michel Noir in Lyon. None the less, the FN has done enough to ensure it remains a strong enough factor to give the orthodox right all manner of problems in the 1989 municipal elections. For the first time in the Fifth Republic, the Gaullists (with 122 seats) were overtaken as the largest party of the Right, by the UDF (with 127 seats). The result is the more surprising since the RPR won more votes than the UDF in constituencies with boundaries redrawn by RPR Interior Minister Charles Pasqua. But the shift reflects the decline of popular provincial Gaullism in the east and west, where it has lost ground to the traditional Christian Democrats and to the Ps, in the north where the PS and FN have cost it support, and in Marseilles where it has lost out to the UDF and FN. But politically Chirac, not Pasqua, was the major loser, his plight emphasized by the way that a number of young Turks-Alain Madelm, Michele Barzach, Alain Juppe, and, especially, Gerard Longuet-pulled off handsome election victories. Barre, despite his elimination at the presidential first round, did, indeed, seem to have the last laugh, and he certainly sounded and seemed less damaged by defeat than Chirac. To some extent the RPR is paying the price for having become the party of Paris: in I988 the RPR took 13 of the I6 seats held by the right in the capital and the remaining UDFs include men like Jacques Dominati, who openly campaigned for Chirac against Barre. In the Paris region overall, the RPR took 32 of the 45 seats won by the right. But in provin~al France the UDF leads the RPR by 114-go-and the RPR’s total includes a seat it ‘won’ in Beauvais thanks only to the disqualification of the PS there. Not only is the UDF well dug-in in many safe rural seats but it is also the leading party in Lyon, Toulouse and (probably) Marseilles. The polls also show that a significant fringe of left voters ha&our more negative attitudes towards the RPR than towards the UDF: the RPR is seen as the PCF of the right-tougher, better organized and more extreme. The result was a differential turnout effect, with left voters at the second ballot notably more willing to turn out against the RPR than against the UDF, an effect only enhanced by the generally low turnout. The result was that PS candidates were far more likely to mobilize the whole Mitterrand electorate against an RPR opponent, perhaps partly because a PS-RPR runoff replicated the presidential second ballot. This popular placement of the RPR to the right of the UDF on the ideological spectrum is a handicap the party cannot afford if it is to concede joint candidacies (and thus equality) with the UDF. It is also maladroit to end up with that image when the UDF is actually the party making most of the deals with the FN. Jean-Claude Gaudin, the UDF leader in Marseilles suffered badly from his association with the FN-Marseilles was the only place where the UDF ran consistently behind even Chirac’s presidential score. But at the end of the day the UDF won five seats in the d@atiement, the RPR one and the FN none, while in Var a

222

The French Presidential Election and the General Election

similar deal also produced five UDF seats to the RPR and FN’s one each. These two deals more than accounted for the UDF’s national lead over the RPR. The unambiguous losers in the 1988 parliamentary election were the FN and the RPR. The PCF had seen its vote rise again at last; the PS had gained 62 seats; and the UDF had actually gained one seat overall and overtaken the RPR. But the biggest loser was really Francois Mitterrand, for he had had most to win. After more than two decades of brilliantly successful generalship of the left, he took too regal a view of his own abilities and, within days of the result, was casting Rocard and Mauroy as the scapegoats for his own fatal overconfidence. The lost opportunity may be better seen by comparing the tour dLci$in terms of percentage of the register, thus controlling for changes in turnout. TABLE 8. The tour d&is&f, 1965, 1973-88 (% of registered electorate) Left

Presidential 1965 Legislative 197 3 Presidential 1974 Legislative 1978 Presidential 198 1 Legislative 198 1 Legislative 1986 Presidential 1988 Legislative 1988

37.4 35.9 42.8 40.1 43.8 40.1 33.1 43.9 34.3

Right 44.8 37.0 43.9 42.1 40.1 32.2 41.0 37.7 33.3

The Socialists are now faced with the nightmare that haunted them in 1986: they are the party indispensable to any majority, but dependent on either the Communists or the Centrists to make up that majority. The line of cleavage between those who prefer the unity of the left to the alliance with the centre runs right through the PS and its electorate, as it has for the past quarter of a century. The PS is therefore likely in for a rough ride, though so too is the PCF, faced with secular decline, and RPR and UDF, defeated, disunited and confronted by a racist extreme right led by a talented and unscrupulous tribune. All the major parties are divided at the elite level, as potential leaders jockey for position and the succession. At the same time, they must deal with a more unstable electorate, increasingly detached from its traditional partisan moorings by social, political and ideological change. In these circumstances, prudent political scientists will prefer explaining the past to predicting the future. Notes and References 1. The best analyses of the results and the electorate are to be found in Philippe Habert and Colette Ysmal (editors), (k Figaro/Etudes Pofitiques) ‘L’Election Presidentielle 1988’ and ‘Elections Legislatives 1988’ (both Paris, 1988); Le Monde (Dossiers and Documents), ‘L’election presdentielle 24 avril-8 mai 1988’ (Paris, 1988); Le / ournal des Elections, ‘ 5 Cl&s pour le 2e Tour’, No. 1, (avilimai 1988), ‘Les Marges de Manoeuvre du President’, No. 2 (mai 1988), and ‘Les Surprises d’un scrutin qu’on disait sans surprise’, No. 3 (juin 1988); and Jean Charlot (editor), ‘L’Election presidentielle et les elections legislatives de 1988. Etudes, Sondages et Estimations de I’IFRES’, (Paris: IFRES, 1988). For a comparison with the presidential election of 1981 see D. B. Goldey and A. F. Knapp, ‘Time for a Change’, Electoral Studies, I:1 and 1:2, 1982, and A. Lancelot, et al., LesElections de I’Alternance, (Paris, 1986); and for the general election of 1986, D. B. Goldey and R. W. Johnson, ‘The French General Election of 16 March 1986’, ElectoralStudies, 5:3, 1986 and E. Dupoirier and G. Grunherg, mars 1986: la drble de d@ite de lo gauche, (Paris, 1986).

DAVIDB. GOLDEYANDR. W. JOHNSON

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2. For a convenient summary of events from 198 1, seeLe Mom& (Dossiers and Documents), ‘Bilan du Septennat, L’altemance dam l’altemance’, (Paris, 1988); for the movement of opinion since 1986, SOFRES, L’etat de I’opinion, 1987 and 1988, (P ark, 1987 and 1988); and 0. Duhamel and J. Jaffre, Le Nouveau President, (Paris, 1987), with reflections on party strategy and institutional adjustments. See also, Cahiers du CEVPOF, Nos. 1 and 2. 3. J. Jaffre, ‘Le Pen: ou le vote exutoire’, Le Mom&, 12 avril 1988. 4. F. Rey, J.-P. Mithois and D. Poucet, Mi~~ewa~ 2, ies secrets d he camflagae 22 _f&tir-8 mai 1988, (Paris, 1988); and K. Evin, Francois Mitterrand, Chronip~e d’une Gctoire annonde, (Paris, 1988), by the press secretary of his campaign staff. 5. See Charlot (editor), ‘L’Election presidentielle . . , IFRES’ and his article in Figure, ‘L’Election prbidentidle 1988’. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. The tour dkisfis the ballot which decides an election: the single ballot in 1986, the second ballot in the 1988 presidential contest. In two-ballot general elections it consists of the left/right division on the second round, plus the similar division on the first ballot in seats won on that round. 9. The Mobs article was reprinted in Le Monde, ‘Les Elections Iegislatives’; more thorough and useful analyses of the general election are to be found in Figaro, ‘Elections legislatives’. But see also, C. Ysmal, ‘Scrutins a surprises’, fiojet, 212, July/August I988 on abstention. 10. For a prescient analysis see J. Jaffre, ‘Une Victoire en trompe l’oeil’, Le Monde, 4 June 1988.