The Routledge Handbook of French Politics and Culture

Marion Demossier, David Lees, Aurélien Mondon, Nina Parish, Marion Demossier, David Lees, Aurélien Mondon, Nina Parish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032176505
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317325895
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Routledge Handbook of French Politics and Culture provides a detailed survey of the highly differentiated field of research on French politics, society and culture across the social sciences and humanities.

The handbook includes contributions from the most eminent authors in their respective fields who bring their authority to bear on the task of outlining the current state-of-the art research in French Studies across disciplinary boundaries. As such, it represents an innovative as well as an authoritative survey of the field, representing an opportunity for a critical examination of the contrasts and the continuities in methodological and disciplinary orientations in a single volume.

The Routledge Handbook of French Politics and Culture will be essential reading and an authoritative reference for scholars, students, researchers and practitioners involved in, and actively concerned about, research on French politics, society and culture.

Part I

Politics in modern and contemporary France

1
From despair, to hope, to limbo

The French elections and the future of the Republic

Aurélien Mondon

Few thought that the 2017 presidential elections would be particularly interesting or surprising. While the potential accession of Marine Le Pen to the second round was discussed as reminiscent to the 2002 shock when her father beat Parti Socialiste (PS) candidate Lionel Jospin in the first round, the situation was rather different. What was a surprise to many in 2002, was expected by most in 2017: the far right would make it to the second round.

In fact, a year before the election, it seemed that very little needed to be decided. Had Hollande and Juppé/Sarkozy been selected as the champions of the centre left and right as planned, Marine Le Pen would have found herself in a perfect position to reap the benefits of decades of disappointment. Since 2012, the media, commentators and politicians appeared to have uncritically accepted that Le Pen would reach the second round and what remained to be decided was who she would face. As Hollande’s ratings went from bad to worse, it became obvious that she would be facing the candidate of Les Républicains (LR), whoever they might have been. Le Pen had received 17.9% and almost 6.5 million votes in 2012, a record for the party, and had since won the 2014 European elections (thanks in part to a huge level of abstention) and broke another record in the 2015 regional elections where the party received 6.8 million votes, but failed to win any single region. As is usually the case in France, the electoral system prevented the Front National (FN) from winning in the second round, as the PS decided to withdraw in favour of the centre right where there was a risk. Yet, as abstention was predicted to be as high if not higher than in 2002, it seemed unavoidable that with a reserve of more than two million votes compared to her father’s best, Marine Le Pen had a clear path to the second round. Ten days before the first round, a poll conducted by Ipsos Steria (2017a) for Le Monde highlighted that only 66% of respondents were certain to vote.

For a party with only two members of parliament elected in 2012, the FN, and Marine Le Pen in particular, received a disproportionate amount of coverage between the two presidential elections. While most of the coverage far right parties tend to receive is negative, various studies have shown that there is no such thing as bad publicity and being in the media ensures that the party’s message is heard (see for example Dézé in Crépon et al. 2015). Jean-Marie Le Pen was famous for exploiting such publicity in periods of electoral calm when the party was no longer in the limelight by uttering deeply racist comments, most famously about the Holocaust. Since she took power in 2011, Marine Le Pen has no longer had to rely on crudely racist comments to receive media coverage. While she does make use of polemical statements such as comparing Muslim prayers to an ‘occupation’ or her more recent comments on the Vel d’hiv round-ups of 1942,¹ she has been treated in a much more amenable manner by the mainstream press (see Alduy in Crépon et al. 2015), at least until the second-round debate. It seems as though the change of leadership and a veneer of moderation in its discourse sufficed to convince much of the media that the FN was a changed party, even though Marine Le Pen decided to keep the name of the party and retain many of the ideas present in previous programmes. While most academics warned that the change is for the most part discursive and superficial (Crépon et al. 2015; Alduy and Wahnich 2015), the mainstream media and commentators took Le Pen at her word that the FN had changed, ignoring that the normalisation process started in the 1980s/90s and had been progressive and superficial.

Everything seemed therefore set for a remake of the 2002 election, bar the shock. Were she to face Hollande on the centre left and Juppé/Sarkozy on the centre right, Le Pen would have been in an incredibly comfortable situation to progress to the second round. Compared to other parties, hers seemed to be gaining steam, and united in its approach. In a climate of deep political distrust and faced with former leading figures of the ‘establishment’ considered responsible for the past 20 years of failed French politics, her status as an outsider, someone who had no share of responsibility in the current situation, made her a natural favourite. This was reinforced by her portrayal in much of the elite discourse as the sole alternative to politics as usual, despite the party’s mixed appeal (Mondon 2015). A tribute to the lack of political imagination in the political elite in France, very few took seriously the possibility of other outsiders emerging despite growing discontentment with the hegemony.

En Marche or enough?

The first signs that the 2017 election would not take place as planned came from the mainstream parties’ nominations.

François Hollande’s dismal approval ratings throughout his mandate had made clear early on that he would be in a difficult position in the first round, and yet it was long expected that he would run (Lees 2016). It was in fact the first time in the Fifth Republic that a healthy outgoing president did not compete for a further mandate. When François Mitterrand retired in 1995, he was already suffering from the cancer that would take his life a year later. Similarly, when Chirac passed on the baton in 2007, his health was deteriorating. Hollande’s decision not to run for a second mandate came very late and as such, it came as both a surprise and relief to most Socialists. This was the first shock in the campaign, as primaries would decide who would be the PS candidate, giving the left a remote chance it would not have had under Hollande. Manuel Valls stood as Hollande’s heir; his legacy as minister of the interior and prime minister meant that his prospects would have remained rather poor in the first round. It was therefore not surprising that Socialist supporters chose a candidate removed from the Hollande presidency: Benoît Hamon, probably the most radical candidate on offer in the primaries, defeated Valls with more than 58% of the vote in January 2017 (Haute Autorité des Primaires Citoyennes 2017).

In November 2016, the Républicains’ primaries had already demonstrated that the obvious status quo was under threat. It had been widely anticipated that the first primaries organised on the right would crown either Chirac’s former prime minister and centre right candidate Alain Juppé or the former president and hard-liner Nicolas Sarkozy. Yet late in the campaign, François Fillon, Sarkozy’s former prime minister and an unknown quantity to most due to his rather dull and technocratic persona, began rising in the polls thanks to his promise to break away from politics as usual. He won in the first round decisively, dealing yet another blow to Sarkozy’s ego after his defeat to Hollande in 2012, and the second round proved a formality as the gap between Fillon and Juppé in the first round was simply too wide (Haute Autorité de primaire ouverte de la droite et du centre 2016). Right-wing voters had chosen their champion and Fillon was given a clear mandate to push through his mix of radical traditional moralism and neo-liberal austerity economics (for more detail on Fillon’s campaign, see Lees 2017).

The defeat of centrist candidates to more radical alternatives created a gap which Emmanuel Macron, a former banker and former minister of the economy under Hollande, managed to occupy successfully. Macron’s fresh face, his polished communication strategy, his age, the fact that he was not a career politician and had never been elected all played in his favour. Throughout the campaign, he managed to retain this centrist position unscathed, appealing to both the centre left and right, despite receiving the support of politicians from the PS, LR and the centrist Mouvement Démocrate (MODEM) party. Even Valls’ support, which was clearly not welcome by Macron, did not seem to damage his image.

When Hamon was selected in the PS primaries, it was expected, as early polls suggested (Ipsos Steria 2017a) that he would soon swallow Mélenchon’s electorate and become the lead left-wing candidate. However, the former Socialist senator turned rogue in 2008 had already proven a convincing and resilient candidate in 2012 when he received 11.10% of the vote (with polls giving him up to 14%, suggesting that his final result may have been potentially reduced by a last-minute vote utile for Hollande). This time, the candidate of La France Insoumise (Untamed France; LFI) declared his candidature early, taking his Communist allies by surprise and forcing them to lend their support before they could see who would be running for the PS. Throughout his campaign, Mélenchon demonstrated the strength of his support and his oratory skills, drawing huge crowds in large events, both live and through holograms. Despite such clear support on the ground, opinion polls did not suggest until the last days of the campaign that he could indeed garner enough support to reach the second round.

On the 23rd April, results were far closer than polls had predicted and only a few thousand votes separated the top four candidates (Table 1.1).

The results of the first round were widely viewed as representing the end of bipartisanship in France, as well as the end of the left/right divide in place of a national/global one. However, such conclusions drawn in the heat of the moment do not hold close scrutiny. A more careful breakdown of the first-round results, beyond the two ‘winners’ points to change, but not the sort of change which has been widely accepted since, in an almost dogmatic manner.

Macron began to lead the polls in late March (Huffpost Pollster 2017), disproving the many who had mocked his candidature early on. Valls in particular had insisted that Macron lacked the necessary experience and represented a ‘populisme light’ with no future (France Info 2016). Surveys proved accurate and Macron won the first round, although not as comfortably as predicted. Perhaps more troubling was the composition of his electorate and their degree of support for Macron and his politics. Early post-election polls suggested that voters who turned to Macron did so without much enthusiasm for either him or his programme. According to a Harris Interactive (2017) poll, only 52% of respondents who declared to have voted for Macron did so because of ideological proximity (vote d’adhésion), while 27% considered it a utilitarian choice (vote utile) and 16% because they had no other choice (vote par défaut). A key myth built around the now youngest French president of the Fifth Republic appeared to be smashed as Macron was not the candidate of the young and energetic, despite his carefully choreographed appearances. Instead, his electorate suggests that he is very much that of the old status quo, drawing most of his support from the 35+ age group, while the young turned predominantly to Mélenchon, Marine Le Pen and abstention (Harris Interactive 2017).

Table 1.1 Results for the first round of the 2017 presidential election.

Candidates	Vote	% registered vote	% vote
Emmanuel MACRON – En Marche	8,656,346	18.19	24.01
Marine LE PEN – Front National	7,678,491	16.14	21.30
François FILLON – Les Républicains	7,212,995	15.16	20.01
Jean-Luc MÉLENCHON – La France Insoumise	7,059,951	14.84	19.58
Benoît HAMON – Parti Socialiste	2,291,288	4.82	6.36
Nicolas DUPONT-AIGNAN – Debout La France	1,695,000	3.56	4.70
Jean LASSALLE – Résistons!	435,301	0.91	1.21
Philippe POUTOU – Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste	394,505	0.83	1.09
François ASSELINEAU – Union populaire républicaine	332,547	0.70	0.92
Nathalie ARTHAUD - Lutte ouvrière	232,384	0.49	0.64
Jacques CHEMINADE – Solidarité et progrès	65,586	0.14	0.18

	Total	% registered vote	% vote
Registered voters	47,582,183
Abstention	10,578,455	22.23
Votes	37,003,728	77.77
Blank ballots	659,997	1.39	1.78
Void	289,337	0.61	0.78
Counted	36,054,394	75.77	97.43

Pyrrhic victory for the FN

While still a shock, the reaction to Marine Le Pen’s accession to the second round was much more tame and resigned than had been the case in 2002, and did not lead to mass demonstrations. When Jean-Marie Le Pen beat Lionel Jospin in the first round to face off against Jacques Chirac, a panicked reaction took hold of France when Le Pen’s face appeared on screens: the new face of fascism was at the gates of power, or so it seemed. Howe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Glossary of key terms
• Introduction: French politics and culture in the Macron era
• Part I Politics in modern and contemporary France
• Part II Identification and belonging
• Part III Spaces of political and cultural contestation
• Part IV Mediating memories and cultures
• Select bibliography
• Index