domingo, 25 de setembro de 2016

The French (primary) revolution


The French (primary) revolution

With four rounds of voting, France’s preliminary presidential contests threaten to upstage the main event.

By PIERRE BRIANÇON 9/26/16, 5:31 AM CET

PARIS — By the time France’s conservative and center-left presidential candidates are chosen in their respective parties’ primaries, they will no longer need enemies.

The nominees will have been picked apart so much by negative attacks from their intra-party rivals, there is likely to be little meat left for general election opponents to feast on.


That’s just one of the ways that primaries, which will take place in both of France’s mainstream parties for the first time in the country’s political history, are set to change the way the French elect their president.

In both the conservative Les Républicains and Socialist parties, the new primary process has been an internal matter — disorganized, improvised, concocted on an ad hoc basis without being legally sanctioned. It has been the subject of much political calculation, and suspected of being designed solely for the benefit of sitting leaders — Nicolas Sarkozy on one side, François Hollande on the other.

Now that the contests have been set — in November for the Right, in January for the Left — they are beginning to change the nature of the typical French presidential campaign, and not only because candidates risk entering the general election stretch with bruises still showing from their intra-party fights.

“If [French political parties] had real activists, more influence, and if their governance was more democratic, in theory they wouldn’t need primaries” —Rémi Lefebvre, Lille University
This will be the third time the Socialists have held a primary to choose their presidential candidate. In the two previous elections — in 2007, when Ségolène Royal became the party’s candidate; and in 2012, when Hollande unexpectedly won the nomination — they had been forced into the procedure because of the lack of a leader who could overcome the party’s deep internal divisions. Holding a primary this year was a matter of fierce debate and Hollande only consented after he’d made sure it would be tailored to his needs.

This time, Les Républicains have also chosen the primary route — not because the party is modernizing but quite the opposite. Rivalries at the top of the party, left adrift after Sarkozy’s defeat in 2012, and allegations of financial impropriety, have forced it to use the least controversial way to choose a presidential torchbearer.

“Primaries are a sign of our political parties’ weaknesses,” said Rémi Lefebvre, a political science professor at Lille University, and the author of a book on the Socialist primaries, “Les primaires socialistes, la fin du parti militant.”

French political parties are not massive, well-financed and well-run organizations with procedures that can stand the test of time, irrespective of who the leader is. They have few paying members, and traditionally went into presidential elections in a disorganized fashion, leaving voters to separate the wheat from the chaff in the first round. “If they had real activists, more influence, and if their governance was more democratic, in theory they wouldn’t need primaries,” Lefebvre said.

Pushed by Le Pen

There is also “a powerful federating force” this year for parties to get their act together, according to a member of the entourage of Alain Juppé, one of the Conservative candidates: Far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who is all but certain to make it to a presidential runoff next year — at least according to current polls, which see her winning about 30 percent of the vote in the first round.

The result in this campaign — because of the spell Marine Le Pen (pictured) casts over the political process — is that France’s next president may be chosen a few months earlier than the actual vote

The lack of primaries in the French system largely stemmed from the fact that in a two-round election, the first round serves as the de facto triage station. A typical election saw several candidates from the Right or the Left running in the first round and both camps regrouping before the second, in which only the top two vote-getters can run.

This year is different. Each of the camps is being forced to identify its champion early, because running multiple candidates would mean elimination in the first round.

Since both the Républicain and Socialist primaries are organized on the two-round principle, the French presidential vote is now effectively a four-round process, Lefebvre said, and that lengthens the campaign.

The result in this campaign — because of the spell Le Pen casts over the political process — is that France’s next president may be effectively chosen a few months earlier than the actual vote, scheduled for May next year.

“The current assumption is that whoever wins the Conservative primary will crush Hollande in the first round and Le Pen in the runoff,” the Juppé aide said.

In other words, between one and three million Conservative voters (according to most pollsters’ assumptions) will decide in November who will be the French president from 2017 to 2022.

“We know that people who vote in the primaries are more urban, educated, informed and politically motivated than the average population,” Lefebvre said. “Primaries bring a distortion to the representative process.”

The ‘primary premium’

Back in 2012, Hollande’s unexpected victory — which came after favorite Dominique Strauss-Kahn was sidelined by accusations of rape in a New York hotel — gave him a popular boost that went well beyond the Socialist ranks.

“The primary gave him the aura of a winner, which he never had before,” said a Socialist official who was one of Hollande’s aides at the time, and asked for anonymity because he won’t vote for him this time.

That “primary premium” was among the reasons Sarkozy was convinced to organize a nominating contest for his own party, yielding to the demands of his potential rivals in September 2014 after he’d taken over the presidency of Les Républicains.

The Socialists themselves scheduled their presidential primary one month after the Right’s — so that Socialist voters would choose their candidate knowing who the Conservative rival would be.
Both parties tried to organize primaries that would be open to non-members, but with mixed results.

The Républicains primary is officially called that of “the Right and Center” — on request from Sarkozy’s rivals who feared that his control over the party’s rank-and-file might make its outcome pre-ordained. But the leader of center-right party Modem, François Bayrou, has refused to participate — fearing the obligation to support whoever emerges as the winner.

The same reservations have led some candidates from the Left or far Left, such as former Socialist minister and senator Jean-Luc Mélenchon, to sit out the Socialist primary, seen as a vehicle designed to marginalize Hollande’s rivals.

The Socialists themselves scheduled their presidential primary one month after the Right’s — so that Socialist voters would choose their candidate knowing who the Conservative rival would be.

Voters in both camps’ primaries in any case risk a bad case of disorientation once the general campaign is underway. They will have to rally behind candidates — Juppé or Sarkozy on the Right, possibly Hollande on the Left — who were heavily criticized by their former rivals. For example, Sarkozy is campaigning on Juppé being old and François Fillon being a wimp; Juppé doesn’t hide that he considers Sarkozy dangerously agitated; and Fillon once said of Sarkozy, whom he served under as prime minister, “Can you imagine De Gaulle being investigated?”

And on the Left, all declared Socialist candidates so far are campaigning against Hollande’s presidential record. They ask him not to run, and accuse him of leading the party to oblivion.


“Meanwhile,” the Juppé aide said, “you can hear Le Pen laughing all the way to the ballot box.”

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