upton-on-line
7th May 2002
French Election Special Edition
In this brief edition
… all you need to know (for now) about the deuxième tour
of the French presidential election
Going through the motions
Despite going through the motions of declaring that a dreadful crisis
had been averted, Jacques Chirac’s massive 82% to 18% win over
Jean-Marie Le Pen had to be one of the least suspenseful election
outcomes in electoral history. The outcome was never in doubt. With
only 16% in the first round, and no candidate from the entire centre,
left, green or extreme left in the field, M Le Pen would have had to
organise mass televised hypnosis or engineer breath-taking electoral
fraud to get within reach of winning.
But if you had come from Mars and witnessed the mass street protests,
soul-searching ruminations by disoriented intellectuals and calls to
arms by guilt-stricken militants of the left, you would have thought
this was a re-run of Berlin in 1932.
Of course it wasn’t. In the end, Le Pen barely moved the extreme right’s
overall total. But there were plenty of people with the motivation to
allege a crisis to cover their own disastrous miscalculations. Assorted
politicians from the left pinned their hope on the highest possible
turn out for Chirac so they could claim credit for his victory – something
they started doing almost before the result was announced. They have
been quick to portray the result (fairly) as a plebiscite on democracy,
not M Chirac (who managed the lowest ever score for a sitting President
in the first round).
A quick U-turn
Having set out six months ago pinning their hopes on knocking M Chirac
out with Lionel Jospin and then arguing for a parliamentary majority
to support him, the left is now inventing all sorts of ingenious reasons
why a new cohabitation is just what the doctor ordered. An outgoing
socialist minister Pierre Moscovici has argued that "a co-habitation
in the next five year term with a president elected in these circumstances
is a totally different matter". Quite how is not clear to upton-on-line
but the Green leader Noël Mamère has been commendably
frank in arguing that a new cohabitation (for which read another lame
duck term for Chirac) is justified so that a referendum can be held
on changing the constitution to outlaw future cohabitations. (Somehow,
if the electorate votes for a co-habitation it’s really voting not to
have one!).
Needless to say, the right won’t have a bar of it. It’s working overtime
to creating a Union for a Presidential Majority in the June parliamentary
elections. (For anglophones, this new movement creates the rather hippapotomoid
acronym, l’UMP). Centrists and market liberals are quickly being
told to shape up and co-operate with the core RPR (Chirac’s party) or
ship out and face electoral oblivion. The aim is to put up just one
candidate for the right in each of the 577 seats. Surprise, surprise,
the left is trying to do the same thing (although with about 8 parties
to cope with that will be a bit of a challenge). As for Jospin’s gauche
plurielle, basically plural is out and left is in (although "better
left rather than more left" as nice M Fabius, the out-going
finance minister puts it.
What are they all scared of?
In a word, the National Front and vote splitting. Because while it
may have lost the presidential race, it sure has a platform from which
to stage a recovery on the parliamentary scene (where it hasn’t at present
a single seat). The right knows that, having crusaded for democracy,
the Republic, liberty, equality and fraternity, it can’t possibly do
deals with the a force so repugnant that M Chirac couldn’t even bring
himself to appear on the same television debate. So they need as large
a vote as is possible. The left knows that if it repeats the orgy of
vote splitting pluralism it indulged in the presidential race, it will
let the chiraquiens win without forcing them into a deal with
Le Pen.
Under the rules of France’s exquisitely nuanced system (designed to
give voters as many chances of correcting their mistakes as possible)
the parliamentary elections also have two rounds. Any man and his dog
can stand in the first round. And if anyone carries 50% plus one, they’re
elected. But where that doesn’t occur there’s a second round in which
candidates who scored more than 12.5% in the first round are allowed
to try again – and this time, the winner is whoever gets the most votes.
Calculations show that (on the basis of the presidential first round),
Mr Le Pen’s forces are likely to beat the 12.5% threshold in over 300
of the 577 seats.
Triangulaire
This would unleash the dreaded virus known as triangulaire in
which a party like Mr Le Pen’s can be a spoiler and deny victory to
others by splitting the vote. M Chirac lives in mortal fear of it –
the left, officially outraged that such people are even allowed to stand
for Parliament, secretly hopes for as much of it as possible – as long
as vote splitting within its own camp don’t end up skewered on its own
triangulation!
The short of it is that the battle has only begun. And Le Pen’s ability
to cause further trouble should not be under-estimated. In some of his
strongholds (the Mediterranean south in particular) he raked up impressive
totals with a whopping 39.48% of the vote in the town of Marignane,
not far from Marseilles. He also has a solid base in the communist heartlands
of the industrial north. And he is a funny, dynamic campaigner. (His
television ads, in upton-on-line’s view, easily outshone Chirac’s –
they focussed on a family photo album showing snaps of him from the
cradle to national notoriety via all sorts of folksy things like sailing
boats and schmoozing with big names).
He is rather grumpy at present (having described the avalanche of spontaneous
revulsion for him as akin to a totalitarian regime). But he is surely
right when he grimly notes that the alliances of convenience that ganged
up to give M Chirac his 82% won’t last. No-one is looking forward more
maliciously to the parliamentary elections than M Le Pen.
Nuclear fallout
Finally, the quirkiest theory on Le Pen. Scientists at France’s nuclear
sciences institute noticed that electoral maps showing the strongest
support for Le Pen (in the north, east and south-east) correlate remarkably
with maps showing the distribution of radioactive fallout over France
from Chernobyl. The correspondence is quite uncanny. So perhaps it’s
all a matter of too many nasty isotopes in the turnips? Who knows? But
the French don’t seem to have lost their sense of humour over it all.
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