Behind the green wave - winners and losers in France's municipal elections

In my last blog entry I looked at how the second round of France’s municipal elections on Sunday 28 June undoubtedly marked a historic moment for the Europe Ecologie-Les Verts (EELV), but also stressed that it could not have happened without the support of the Socialists on the ground and that the vague verte was really more of a vague rose-verte. (In the colour-coding of French politics, pink is used for the Socialists, whose symbol is the rose. Red was traditionally reserved for the Communists and other far-left parties.)

In an article that appeared in Le Monde on Monday 29 June, Sylvie Zappi reasserted the point that while EELV looks like the dynamic partner in the alliance, the Parti Socialiste (PS) can take a great deal of satisfaction from the results and that there has also been an infusion of new blood among the party’s local notables. I don’t intend to revisit that in this entry, but to look rather at what the other parties have taken away from Sunday.

Apart from the now former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe’s comfortable re-election in Le Havre (by 59% to 41% against the local Communists), these elections were un désastre annoncé for President Emmanuel Macron and La République en Marche (LREM). Any hope les marcheurs had of a decent showing after last year’s European elections evaporated in the course of the autumn’s strikes against pension reform, with the party leadership scaling their goals down incrementally until, on the eve, they hoped to see 10,000 LREM local councillors elected. Out of more than half a million.

It was meant to be so different. It’s worth casting our minds back to May 2017, just after the election of Macron, when LREM was simply En Marche!, the ‘start-up’ that had broken the mould of French politics and helped carry its creator into the Elysée. No-one imagined that a new party would solidify immediately, but the nature of post-2002 politics in France, where a general election follows the presidential, saw macronisme begin to take physical shape in the form of a comfortable majority in the National Assembly, supported by its allies in the centre-right MoDem and also among macroncompatible members of the right-wing Les Républicains, who called themselves les constructifs and formed microparties like Agir. The next stage of the challenge was for the movement to become a party, a process I explored here in 2017.

Back then, the man appointed to head up the new party was its delegate-general, Christophe Castaner, now interior minister. It seemed that Castaner had time on his side. The electoral calendar meant that, once the renewal of half the Senate was out of the way in September 2017, the path was clear until the Europeans in 2019, but more importantly the municipals in 2020. Ahead lay the best part of three years to get federations up and running, to recruit new members either from other parties or among those who had never been involved in party politics before. In short, to have a machine and personnel ready to invest local government and to reach out to fellow travellers. But it hasn’t really turned out that way.

Macron’s popularity quickly waned and Castaner was taken off the task when he replaced Gérard Collomb as interior minister in September 2018. Stanilas Guérini, a former Socialist close to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is not a bad organiser, but he isn’t in the league of a Jacques Soustelle or a Charles Pasqua, the organisational brains behind de Gaulle’s RPF and UNR in the former case and Chirac’s RPR in the latter. Guérini is instinctively much more inclined to allow local groups to sort themselves out, whereas Castaner was temperamentally a Jacobin, but neither models have really worked out in recruiting the big battalions. Or even small ones…

That need not matter, of course, in the context of French local elections. After all, the success of EELV is not built on a massive party membership. The overwhelming majority of candidates and councillors across the 35,000 communes are non-aligned independents, and there is a long tradition in the French centre of non-aligned notabilité, but few of them could be persuaded to adopt the LREM ticket, especially given the difficult relationship between local and central government that was already on display for all to see even before the Gilets Jaunes movement exploded. The administration’s attempt to rebuild relations - and in particular during the Covid-19 crisis - came too late for the municipal elections.

Instead, LREM was left trying to cut electoral alliances in places where 2017 and 2019 had revealed a reasonable seam of macroniste voters - mostly in France’s larger cities. Thus you could find a separate LREM list in one town, but in another an LREM/MoDem alliance, or a broad centre-right/centre left list, with LREM as its hinge. Often there were alliances with the right-wing Les Républicains, or even Socialists. In some places you might even come across the official LREM list running against a dissident one. It’s a fragmented field. After the first round of the election, Laurent de Boissieu reckoned that the presidential party had fewer than 300 local councillors, less than a third of what even the Communists had managed.

The key, then, would lie in the choice of second round allies and here the party found there weren’t many. Some see the decision to look for electoral agreements with Les Républicains in cities like Lyon and Bordeaux as yet more evidence of Macron’s droitisation or at least an honest declaration that LREM is centre-right. There are counter examples of course (Nîmes for one) but this was the general impression and it was only reinforced by LREM’s attempt to stigmatise EELV as hiding a radical agenda beneath the cloak of woolly environmentalism. But Macron also knows that the greatest threat to him for 2022 comes from a renascent republican right. They know it too, and yet…

In some ways, Les Républicains were in the same sort of position ahead of these elections as the PS. They are strong on the ground, embedded, with plenty of local élus right across the piece, from the smallest to the largest commune. After the humiliation of the 2019 Europeans, LR leaders had billed these elections as the moment where they got back to winning ways - ‘renouer avec la victoire’ as party chairman Christian Jacob put it.

In an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche at the beginning of June, François Baroin, chair of the Association des Maires de France and the LR candidate-apparent for 2022, claimed that the cycle of defeat for the right was coming to an end. (French psephologists often talk about electoral cycles. Thus, when François Mitterrand was elected President of the Republic in 1981, dissolved parliament and won a crushing majority, this marked, all the same, the end of an electoral cycle that saw the left and in particular the PS make significant incremental gains across the preceding decade.)

The 15 March certainly gave LR grounds for optimism. As the clear winner of the 2014 municipal elections, and with many of its outgoing mayors standing for re-election, the signs were good. Baroin was easily re-elected in Troyes in the first round, Christian Estrosi in the second in Nice and ‘red’ Limoges, taken from the left in 2014 held. And yet, no-one is writing about 2020 as the vague bleue bis.

Rachida Dati may have given the right in Paris a shot in the arm and taken the mairie of the 7th arrondissement in the first round, but in Lyon and Bordeaux, the decision to strike a deal with the macronistes for the second round backfired, as the EELV and its allies took control. The loss of Bordeaux, which the right has held since 1945, was felt particularly acutely, and gains of cities like Orléans and Metz could not make up for that.

Meanwhile, down in Marseille, the right appeared to be losing control of the city Jean-Claude Gaudin controlled since 1995. At the time of writing, the identity of the next mayor of Marseille remains uncertain, but the withdawal of the LR tête de liste Martine Vassal in the wake of allegations of electoral fraud has not helped their cause, while the EELV-led alliance, which actually won the election in terms of absolute votes, may well take power. Worse, the willingness of more moderate LR members to seem more open to the government is only causing the parties right wing to pull in the other direction.

The 2014 municipal elections were breakout elections for the then Front National, in the sense that the party took control of town councils outside of its southern heartlands, as the Front du Nord began to make its mark alongside of but distinct from the Front du Sud. Indeed the two elections of 2014 - municipal and European - made it something of an annus mirabilis for Marine Le Pen, followed by the regional elections in late 2015 that appeared to justify her claim that the FN was ‘le premier parti de France’, as it took 28% of the vote nationally, ahead of both LR (27%) and the PS (23%). But an electorate is one thing, a party is another.

Neither Le Pen nor the Rassemblement National (RN) paid very much attention to the municipal elections this year. The main focus was on consolidating the gains of 2014 and that was achieved in most places in the first round. After that, the principal focus was on Perpignan, where Le Pen’s former partner Louis Aliot has set up his electoral base and, oddly enough, in Moissac, a small and picturesque village in the Tarn-et-Garonne where the presence of seasonal workers and an outbreak of Covid-19 helped the far-right list take 62% of the vote in the second round. In Perpignan, a luke-warm republican front against Aliot was not enough to save the outgoing LR mayor Jean-Marc Pajol.

It’s not that Le Pen no longer cares about local government, but she is mindful of the potential of a strong RN mayor emerging as a rival. Indeed, the emergence of any kind of challenger on the far right ahead of the 2022 presidential election is at the forefront of her mind at all times and a poor campaign in a secondary election would do her more harm than good given that her name and her fate is so closely bound to that of her party. It is clear that Le Pen will not throw herself into a full-on campaign for the next regional elections, due in March 2021 at the same time as deprtmental councils are re-elected. (My thanks to Dr Mason Norton for spotting my error in the original version of this article stating the regionals were in December 2021. No cheeky Cummingsesque editing in my area.)

As Marine Le Pen is to the RN, so is Jean-Luc Mélenchon to La France Insoumise (LFI), despite the efforts of other prominent insoumis to emerge from his shadow. Mélenchon has been the grand absent from this campaign. Like Le Pen, he has focused his efforts on criticising the government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis, but LFI have really made precious little effort to make an impact on the election. LFI strategy at the local level is less about setting up party branches and more about infiltrating local mouvements citoyens. If that sounds a bit sinister, it is and it isn’t. Mélenchon would describe it as a more democratic and devolved means of mobilisation. Others might call it something else. But in the context of the municipal elections, the LFI presence on lists has been minimal and dispersed according to local conditions. Thus, in Bordeaux, the LFI joined Philippe Poutou’s Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste Bordeaux en luttes list, which took 12% of the vote in the first round and 9% in the second. In Marseille, by contrast, they were part of Michèle Rubirola’s Printemps Marseillais alliance. And so it goes.

And we should spare a thought for the Communists. I mentioned in a previous entry that the PCF, with its long and historic tradition in municipal politics, had held up surprisingly well in the first round. Alas, the trend did not continue into the second, and just as EELV-PS alliances attracted left-wing Macron voters in some places, so, in other locations, they have taken over from the Communists. It seems almost inconceivable, for example, that the PCF lost Saint-Denis, a Communist stronghold since the Liberation to the PS list led by Mathieu Hanotin. But this is not the only example and several of its bastions in the Ile-de-France have also gone, with the old banlieue rouge looking like a distant memory. It will be of small comfort to the PCF that they have, in their turn, taken Corbeil-Essonnes, the former fiefdom of Serge Dassault.

All of the parties, though, have to face up to the very real challenge of abstentionsim. To British readers, a turnout for local elections of 40% would seem high, but in France, it is usually north of 60%, as this excellent table by Laurent de Boissieu shows. Of course, some of this can be attributed to Covid-19, but it is part of a worrying trend across all elections. If there is a crisis in French democracy, then it is a crisis in which everyone has a share.

I will file the third and final entry on the municipal elections once the councils for Paris, Lyon and Marseille have been formalised over the weekend. It could yet be that the Rassemblement National will play a decisive role in the election of the new mayor of Marseille.

A suivre