Clear your diaries for 28 June - it's the second round of the French local elections

On Saturday 14 March, I wrote a blog entry on the first round of France’s municipal elections due to take place the following day. Two days later, France went into lockdown, with the second round of voting suspended sine die. Regular readers will know that the first round went ahead against a background of great uncertainty and against President Emmanuel Macron’s better judgement, with pretty much all party leaders and other key figures insisting that to shut down the elections would be to shut down democracy. (You’re damned if you do…)

The question of when to stage the second round of the elections - or whether both rounds should be completely re-run - has been one of the background stories of the last few weeks, but finally, a couple of days ago, the government announced that, ‘following the science on this one’, as the UK government might say, the second round has been pencilled in, Covid-19 permitting, for Sunday 28 June. Not everyone is happy with this, but again, most of the political heavyweights, especially those with a vested interest as candidates, want to get the thing done. (Oddly enough, Gérard Larcher, speaker of the Senate and one of those who spoke strongly in favour of carrying on with the first round, has been much more circumspect about the second.)

[Since I published this piece, Larcher has announced that ‘j’assume’ - ‘I take responsibility’ - for his view. Probs because he read this blog. See screen grab at the bottom of this entry]

To no-one’s great surprise, turnout on 15 March 2020 was way down on 2014, by some 18% to (officially) just under 45% (but still way ahead of the UK’s ballpark local election figure of 35%). I say ‘officially’, because the excellent Laurent de Boissieu, whose figures I shall come back to in a moment, reckons the real figure was less than 42%. Despite the conditions and the poor turnout, some 30,000 of France’s 35,000 communes now have new elected administrations, although the formal process of handing power over to new councils has only just taken place. It is mostly, though not exclusively, larger towns and cities that don’t have their new councils yet, those councils where PR is used. (There is a perfectly serviceable account in English of how the elections work here.)

Macron’s La République en Marche (LREM) went into the election with low expectations and the results of 15 March confirmed that. It’s not always easy to extract a national performance from the extraordinary tapestry of 35,000 electoral districts, especially since in the smaller communes political labels are meaningless, although the Interior Ministry endeavours, all the same, to attach a tendency to each. Laurent de Boissieu (again) glossed the national result in an article for La Croix which I shall speak to here briefly for non-French readers.

LREM took around 60 larger communes in the first round, BUT in almost every case this was in alliance with its Centrist ally MoDem or with macroncompatibles right-wing candidates, either in parties such as Agir or even Les Républicains (LR). Municipal elections are always about conditions on the ground, but also about local rivalries, and in some communes candidates from the same party might stand on different lists. Or even in neighbouring communes, the line up of lists and party alliances can be very different.

Generally, then, lists supporting the government comprised not just LREM members, but a range of allies, from the centre-right and right, but also from the left in cities like Lyon (where they did badly) or Strasbourg. (More on this closer to the second round.)

The mainstream right, still shattered by losing 2017 and its failure to stage any sort of comeback in the 2019 European elections, appears to have held up quite well at the local level - but that is not surprising. In its 2014 iteration as the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) and then the main opposition to François Hollande, the right did well and this year has tended to benefit from the prime au sortant, the advantage enjoyed by the incumbent when they stand for re-election (reckoned to be worth about a 5% headstart).

The real story of the first round - or perhaps the two stories - were that while the Rassemblement National (RN) and other extreme-right parties held the ground they took in 2014, they have not pushed on, despite three years of macronisme, and, more to the point, emerging in first place at 2019’s Europeans. The second (and more important to my mind) has been the recovery of the left, in large part thanks to the re-emergence of the ecology movement, in all its 40 shades of green.

The main ecology party in France is Europe Ecologie-Les Verts (EELV), but French environmentalism is a very broad and diverse church. Nevertheless, the movement has taken significant steps forward since 2017 and in the 2019 European elections came third behind the RN and LREM lists with 14% of the national vote. Now, we’ve been here before. I can recall when I was a young postgraduate student in Paris the sense of excitement among ecologists in France when the party appeared to make a significant breakthrough in the 1989 European elections, only to stall. This time, however, green has been the colour of hope for the French left, with environmentalists (EELV or others) often acting as the glue holding together a number of red-green lists in France’s major (and not-so-major) cities. In some places these lists have included Communists, Socialists, Benoît Hamon’s microparty Génération.s and even La France Insoumise.

Figure 1 - Results from Communes of 1000 inhabitants or more. From Laurent de Boissieu - France-Politique/La Croix

Figure 1 - above - is taken from Laurent de Boissieu France-Politique web site. The table also appeared in La Croix, along with his gloss here. What he has done, using the Interior Ministry’s political labels for each list, is to produce a refined version of the results in communes of 1000 inhabitants or more. The table might look bewildering, but it is not so very difficult to decipher, even if your French is a bit ropey. What matters are the overall figures he has arrived at for each category of lists. Thus, the broad left that I mentioned above, according to his calculations, took 26% of the vote. Now, within that 26%, the largest number of lists and of votes were cast for divers gauche lists - lists that involved any number of left-wing parties, and with EELV and other ecology movements classified as left.

Of course, the electoral business is not yet done, and this first round result may not turn into swathes of red-green local councils across metropolitan France in the second. The results have, however, provided food for thought on the left about the future of a potential electoral alliance, with 2022 looming on the horizon. It would be by no means straightforward bring all these different elements together, as Abel Mestre and Sylvie Zappi’s excellent and insightful article in Le Monde on 29 April underlined, but the Covid-19 crisis might signal a significant shift towards a radical left-ecologist agenda in France. The question will be whether it will be possible to find a single candidate to make a serious challenge.

Thus, despite some major reservations, the French will be invited to pull on their masks and go and vote on 28 June. The political class wants les municipales out of the way: the opposition because they hope to do well, the government because they know they won’t and need to move on. If, in the event, 28 June is a washout, we’re looking at January 2021, and nobody wants that.

Larcher - J’assume