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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