The 2017 French presidential election did not follow its expected course. As the next data point in a study of French electoral history under the Fifth Republic, its outcomeâthe election of Emmanuel Macron as its eighth president since 1959âdid not match the dynamics which, until 2012, had predominantly shaped the outcome of presidential elections, that is, the alternation in power between left and right since the early 1980s. Moreover, the expectation had been, until mid-2016, that the 2017 election would precisely follow the pattern of those dynamics very closely. Indeed, one could go further and state that the expected outcome of the election should have been the accession of the candidate from the Les RĂ©publicains (LR), as a straight alternation with the socialist incumbent, François Hollande. Even in that regard, however, the eventual LR candidate was not the individual that most commentators would have expected: Alain JuppĂ©, not François Fillon, was probably the favoured moderate right notable expected to occupy the ElysĂ©e Palace on 7 May 2017. The evidence of public opinion, both on the presidential race only a year out and in party primaries, and the purported party system dynamics shaping French electoral competition, all pointed clearly to the former prime minister and mayor of Bordeaux comfortably winning the run-off, against Marine Le Pen, the Front National (FN) candidate.
The presence of Marine Le Pen in the second round was itself not a standard feature of the Fifth Republicâs bipolar competition traditionally conditioning presidential dynamics across the left and right blocs. However, whatever the academic conventions on how left and right blocs should confront each other in the second round, the FN candidateâs consistent polling ahead of any candidate other than Alain JuppĂ©, and never below 20 per cent since 2013, illustrated her solid position to move into the ballottage. Her eventual score of 33.9 per cent in that second round also confirmed the presence of a majority of French voters as solidly against Le Pen and her party, from all sections of the political spectrum, as for the eventual winner. The so-called front rĂ©publicainâthe willingness of left and right to support each otherâs candidates to face down the FNâput paid to any fears of a radical right-wing head of state rising to power in France, where other European countries such as Austria or the Netherlands (premier rather than president) had avoided this outcome.
What is striking about the front républicain phenomenon is that both the Parti Socialiste (PS) and LR were forced to ask their voters to support the moderate candidate against Le Pen. For the first time under the Fifth Republic, neither of the main parties was present in the run-off. For this book on the presidential elections, then, the primary goal has to be to explain how this situation occurred and whether this can be interpreted as a dynamic step in the evolution of the French party and political system, rather than a one-election aberration.
The results in Table 1.1 make it clear that the landslide that Macron won in the second round, and which his party, La RĂ©publique en Marche! (LRM) replicated in the subsequent legislative elections in June, which we cover in Chap. 9, was not based upon an affective outpouring of electoral support in the first round, with 24 per cent of the vote. In 2012, Hollande had won the first round with 28.6 per cent, while Nicolas Sarkozyâs vote share in 2007 was as high as 31.2 per cent. Indeed, in 2017, Macron barely did any better than Lionel Jospin in 1995, at a time when the Socialist Party was in tatters following its 1993 legislative debacle.
Table 1.1
2017 Presidential election first- and second-round results
Candidate | First round | Second round | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Votes | % registered | % valid | Votes | % registered | % valid | |
Emmanuel MACRON | 8,656,346 | 18.19 | 24.01 | 20,743,128 | 43.61 | 66.10 |
Marine LE PEN | 7,678,491 | 16.14 | 21.30 | 10,638,475 | 22.36 | 33.90 |
François FILLON | 7,212,995 | 15.16 | 20.01 | |||
Jean-Luc MĂLENCHON | 7,059,951 | 14.84 | 19.58 | |||
BenoĂźt HAMON | 2,291,288 | 4.82 | 6.36 | |||
Nicolas DUPONT-AIGNAN | 1,695,000 | 3.56 | 4.70 | |||
Jean LASSALLE | 435,301 | 0.91 | 1.21 | |||
Philippe POUTOU | 394,505 | 0.83 | 1.09 | |||
François ASSELINEAU | 332,547 | 0.70 | 0.92 | |||
Nathalie ARTHAUD | 232,384 | 0.49 | 0.64 | |||
Registered | 47,582,183 | 47,568,693 | ||||
Abstention | 10,578,455 | 22.23 | 12,101,366 | 25.44 | ||
Voted | 37,003,728 | 77.77 | 35,467,327 | 74.56 | ||
Blank | 659,997 | 1.39 | 1.78 | 3,021,499 | 6.35 | 8.52 |
Spoiled | 289,337 | 0.61 | 0.78 | 1,064,225 | 2.24 | 3.00 |
Valid | 36,054,394 | 75.77 | 97.43 | 31,381,603 | 65.97 | 88.48 |
No presidential election in France has seen four candidates this equally placed: in 2017, the average margin between the four top candidates was as low as 1.5 percentage points compared with 5.8 and 6.9 in 2012 and 2007, respectively, and one has to go back to the 2002 âearthquakeâ election to find such a close first-round race. That MĂ©lenchonâs fourth place at 19.6 per cent of the vote reflects a âtoo little, too lateâ surge in support for the populist radical left candidate in the latter part of the campaign, or that Fillonâs third place (20 per cent) and elimination seems appropriate, given the spectre of the Penelopegate scandal which effectively hobbled his campaign, is coincidentalâthe four shares of the vote to all intents and purposes reflect four very different, but equally weighted, social and attitudinal groups in French society supporting candidates with very different policy positions and visions of France in the world.
The other surprising absence from the second round, and shocking absence from the top four in the first round, is the socialist candidate. BenoĂźt Hamonâs election in the socialist primary in January 2017 may have been a surprise to those expecting this preliminary race to be between the two heavyweights of the opposing governmental and frondeur courants, former Prime Minister Manuel Valls and former Economics Minister Arnaud Montebourg, but as the candidate of one of the two duopolistic parties of government, Hamonâs position could have been expected to be more secure in the standard play-off between left and right. In the end, the sheer unpopularity of the incumbent socialists, and by extension perhaps of any representative of their party, and the growing realization that a vote for a candidate polling at best a distant fourth and, by the end of the campaign, a receding fifth, was a wasted vote, particularly in ensuring as strong a âdemocraticâ candidate as possible to face the âanti-democraticâ Le Pen, ended in the abandoning of Hamon both by many socialist Ă©lĂ©phants and the voters themselves. This gave the socialist candidate a disastrous 6.4 per cent of the vote, du jamais vu for a socialist runner since Gaston Defferreâs debacle in the 1969 election in the old days of communist hegemony on the French left.
Fillonâs own dismissal from the race was by less than half-a-million votes. In opinion polls at the end of 2016, this sort of margin looked to be what divided Fillon from Le Pen. By the beginning of the year, it separated him from Macron, with Le Pen riding high in first place. By the election itself, what looked six months earlier to be a replication of ChiracâLe Pen in 2002 had shifted to a different structure entirely. Had Fillon progressed to the second round, his victory against Le Pen would have been assured. Indeed, had any candidate reached the second round, the cordon sanitaire would have prevented an FN victory. A victory for Fillon would have followed the path of what has now become a clichĂ© of any commentary on the Fifth Republicâs executive complexionânamely, that with the exception of 2007, no government since 1978 had ever managed to renew its mandate. Given the previous disconnect between presidential and legislative election calendars, this hyper-alternance between left and right had seen the discordant electoral cycles penalize governments mid-term and post-presidentials. But as we consider in Chap. 2, in 2017 the evidence suggested that this pattern had returned for the harmonized presidential-legislative set-up.
It had not. The incumbent PS lost, but the apparently well-placed LR could not claim its expected victory. What led to the two parties which had thus far dominated Fifth Republic politics finding themselves in the position of also-rans?
1 A Pre-ordained Defeat: The Electoral Decline of François Hollande and the PS
In a situation of une politique bloquĂ©e (blocked polity), the inability of either governing party to deliver satisfactory executive policy performance should lead to a cycle of alternation whereby the left and the right take it in turns to effectuate one term of inadequate government. Hollandeâs victory in 2012, famously promising Le changement, câest maintenant, took place in precisely this context. And in line with the politique bloquĂ©e argumentâa closed system of self-selecting elites, endlessly alternating power between themselvesâthe progression of Hollandeâs presidency matched that of his Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) predecessor in many key respects, which we detail in the next chapter. Within a couple of months, Hollandeâs popularity ratings had dropped below 50 per cent approvalâno evidence of a honeymoon period hereâand within a year dropped below 20 per cent, only to rise above this ceiling a total of twice in the next four years. Hollandeâs three prime ministers, Jean-Marc Ayrault, Manuel Valls and, briefly, Bernard Cazeneuve, fared little better, with only Valls managing any sustained period above 30 per cent positive ratings.1
In the early day of Hollandeâs presidency, embarrassing clashes with his soon-to-be former partner, ValĂ©rie Trierweiler, and a hesitant, âunpresidentialâ start made for poor PR. However, as the presidency progressed, a series of more prosaic, but policy-based issues ensured that his period of office would be synonymous with failed politics. In particular, an obstinate unemployment rate, rising national debt and a public deficit which, whilst smaller than when he took office, never reached the promised 3 per cent, gave critics an objective baseline. Ideologically, the retreat from his speech at Le Bourget, promising a root-and-branch reform of the financial sector, and instead offering tax breaks to business, alienated a large proportion of the socialist electorate, as well as activists and politicians, who opposed social liberalism as a market-driven force of the right. From the arrival of Manuel Valls, and the changing of the Bercy guard from Arnaud Montebourg to Emmanuel Macron, the most vocal critics of the socialist government were the so-called frondeurs (literally, âslingersâ) from within the PS, challenging a more centrist economic programme which lacked electoral legitimacy. The El-Khomri employment law, first put to the National Assembly in February 2016, which reduced workersâ rights and strengthened business, came to symbolize the abandoning of the socialistsâ core constituency (even though lower socio-economic strata had long since become a secondary support group for the PS). Meanwhile, the strong law-and-order agenda adopted by Vallsâs government amidst the Islamic terrorist attacks of 2015 would alienate further the cultural left and the Greens, notably leading to the resignation of Justice Minister Christiane Taubira from the government in January 2016, a critical political event in the second half of Hollandeâs presidency.
Electorally, the PS suffered greatly as a result of this poor executive approval. Successive European, local and regional elections delivered ever greater blows to the p...