17 December 2015
“Je partage votre colère!”
by Richard Pooley
In among the Christmas cards in our French postbox last Thursday was a glossy 3-page election leaflet – the first we had received from any of the eleven lists competing for our votes in France’s regional elections. The headline on page one, translated as “I share your anger!”, was in orange. That on page three – “Women of the Lot Department, Men of the Lot Department, Abstainers, Angry Voters” – was in white on red. Most of the text was in black, though much of this was highlighted in green and yellow. The language was colourful too.
The chief target was the Front National, which had come first in our region in the first round of voting on Sunday 6 December. Midi-Pyrénées/Languedoc-Roussillon, of which the Lot Department is a part, is the second biggest of the thirteen regions of France. Its 5.6 million people live in an area which is over half the size of England. In the first round, the Liste Front National, headed by Louis Aliot, partner for the past six years of FN’s leader, Marine le Pen, won 31.83% of the vote. The centre-left Liste du Parti Socialiste got 24.41% and the Liste Union de la Droite et du Centre, in effect the newly-named Républicains, 18.84%. Turnout, as across France, was low. Nearly 48% didn’t vote (called Abstentionistes) and 3% left their voting envelopes empty.
At first glance, I assumed the glossy leaflet was a call to arms (and to vote in the second round) from the Socialist party to the Abstentionistes. After all, not only had the Socialists come second but the way the French election process works made them favourites to overtake the FN and win in round two on 13 December.
Since several of our British friends are bemused by the French voting system, I must assume a few of you are too. Regional elections in France have two rounds, a week apart. In the first, voters have to choose one out of many lists of candidates put forward by the various parties and political groupings. At our polling station in the village Mairie there were eleven piles of lists laid out along the tables and a pile of voting envelopes. After showing your carte d’identité, you can either pick up a copy of the list of candidates you are going to vote for and head for the voting booth or take some or all of the lists. Most seem to take the latter course, presumably so as to keep their vote secret. Once behind the curtain of the booth, you put your chosen list in the envelope and head back out to have your voting card checked. Your name and number are called and you put your envelope into the box, the election official announcing “avoté!” as you do so. Those lists which win more than 10% of the vote in round one can go forward to round two. In this final round the list which wins the most votes automatically gets 25% of the seats in the region. The remaining seats are allocated according to the share of the vote each list has obtained. So, if there were, say, 100 seats being fought for and the Socialists won the most second round votes with 40%, they would take 55 seats – 25 plus 40% of 75. In our region over 17% of the votes cast in the first round were for parties to the left of the Parti Socialiste. So, the Socialists could have expected those votes to come to them in the second round. If they could persuade enough Abstentionistes to come out and vote against the Front National, they might not need Républicain voters to ‘hold their noses’ and vote Socialist.
In fact I was wrong. The leaflet was from the Républicains and such allies as Chasse Pêche Nature et Traditions. Its writer was Aurélien Pradie, proudly declaring that at 29 he was the youngest mayor in the Lot Department. He accused the FN of being impostors. His prime example was the head of the FN in the Lot, Emmanuel Crenne. Here is a flavour of the invective, roughly translated:
“To vote FN is to give a voice to an ex ‘trader’ coming from London and parachuted into the Lot after having spent years involved in financial speculation, stirring millions of euros in a glass tower in the City. There you are, the truth! His motivation? ‘It is money! I was a trader for 17 years. If you are not motivated to make money for yourself, you cannot make money for the bank.’ [from an interview in June 2014 with Emmanuel Crenne]. These are not our values!”
So, here is France’s equivalent of the Tory party attacking a successful banker as someone who does not share their values. I have found out quite a lot about Monsieur Crenne. He is 45, went to the prestigious Sciences Po in Paris, is an engineer, speaks several languages, worked for Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs in the UK and now lives and works in the Lot. He is someone who many new FN voters would probably easily identify with. Recent polls have shown that the people who have started to vote for the FN are young, middle class and entrepreneurial, just the sort of French people Monsieur Crenne would have found in ever greater numbers when he worked in London . They have joined the traditional source of FN support – the working and lower middle-class.
Why would such people now vote for the FN? The reason most often offered is that Marine Le Pen has softened its image: it is no longer the racist, anti-semitic party created by her father in 1972. Is the ‘far right’ label still true? Some of its policies – nationalisation of the banks, price controls – look socialist. And its pro-abortion position would horrify its many admirers among the Tea Party Republicans in the USA. However, it still aims to cut legal immigration from the current 200,000 per year to 10,000 and deport illegal immigrants. It wants France to all but abandon the European Union – restore the French Franc, leave the Common Agricultural Policy (despite France being a net beneficiary), end the Schengen agreement and restore control over France’s borders. It wants a pan-European Union to be created which includes EU states, Switzerland and Russia. What this new Union would achieve is not clear but it may reflect the close ties between Putin and the Le Pen family. Above all, it is resolutely opposed to the erosion of ‘French values’ by ‘Islamisation’.
I suspect a lot of new FN voters don’t believe that many of these policies would be enacted should the party ever gain national power. What the FN and the two-round election system gives them is an opportunity to show their fury and frustration with the failure of both the Socialists and the Republicans to tackle successfully France’s long-term and deep economic and social problems.
On 7 December, the day after the first round, a leading Socialist politician called for the voters of his party and the Republicans – “true democrats” – to come together and defeat the “undemocratic” FN in the second round. He compared this to what had happened to the French Resistance during the later stages of the Second World War: Communists and Gaullists fighting together to defeat the Germans and their collaborators, the Vichy government. The implication was clear: the FN is the descendant of Vichy. That slur still has force in France. In fact there was precious little collaboration between the Resistance groups. Indeed, I wonder if the Lot’s youngest mayor is aware of the irony of his attack on his FN rival: British agents were parachuted into his department in early 1944 in order to bring together and lead disparate groups of Resistance fighters.
In the event, the FN failed to build on their success in the second round of voting last Sunday. Despite being ahead in six regions, they did not win one. The Socialists withdrew their list from the two regions where they had come third in round one and where Marine le Pen and her 26-year old niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, had each won more than 40%. They asked their supporters to vote for the Republicans in order to keep the FN from power. The system allows for such machinations, though ex-President Sarkozy would not withdraw any of his Republican lists to even where they had come third to the Socialists. The Republicans duly won these two regions and another five. But at what cost? The Parti Socialiste will have no regional representatives at all for the next five years in two regions. The FN will be a strong opposition party in most regions, able to continue to blame the governing party for not solving France’s intractable problems. The FN will argue ever more strongly that there is so little difference between the Parti Socialiste and the Républicains that each asked their supporters to back the other to defeat the FN. Who are the true democrats?
Marine Le Pen will be the FN candidate in the 2017 Presidential election, 18 months from now. It is still highly likely that she will win the most votes in the first round. But in France’s presidential election, only two candidates go forward to the second round. So, who will join her? The current president, François Hollande, a Socialist, whose approval ratings have been the worst in the history of the Fifth Republic? Or ex-president, Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of the Republicans, whose current approval ratings, even within his own party, are not much higher? Will the Abstentionistes in the first round come out and vote against the FN in the second round, as some of them did in last Sunday’s regional elections? Or will they remain at home, as did 38% of French voters on Sunday? Will either the Socialist or Republican voters of the first round hold their noses and vote against Marine Le Pen in the second round? I wouldn’t bet on it.
And what happened in our region? The Republican author of the election leaflet, Monsieur Pradie, must be a disappointed man. His party came third, getting barely a fifth of the vote. The Socialists won with 45%; the FN were second with 34%. He won a seat though. But then so did Monsieur Crenne, parachuted in from the evil City of London to represent the FN. They will have to sit together in the Lot over the next five years and do the best they can for us. Together.
