An activist glues a poster for Socialist Party candidate François Hollande
over a poster of President Nicolas Sarkozy of the UMP (2012)
Just
14 percent of the councilors sitting on France's departmental councils were women just over a week ago. That depressing number is comparable to what we see in the United States, where 81 percent of Congress is male, and in many other legislative bodies
around the world.
But last Sunday, that number soared all the way to 50 percent.
France held local elections for its departmental councils (mid-level assemblies roughly akin to county councils in the U.S.), and 2,054 of the 4,108 victors were women—perfect gender parity. The left, however, was left out. How did both of these things happen, and why did they happen at the same time? Head below the fold for more.
These overnight transformations were, quite simply, the result of a major change to France's electoral laws. The current Socialist government redrew the entire map of local districts that make up the country's departments, cutting the total number of districts in half, and it introduced the rule that every district must elect a ticket made up of two candidates—one woman and one man. That reform has shattered a persistent glass ceiling, and it has brought in hundreds of new faces in councils where it's often been hard to dislodge aging and disproportionately male incumbents.
Such parity was not easy to accomplish, as testified by an earlier attempt by a center-left government in France. In 2000, a new law required parties to field the same number of male and female candidates in national elections. But that didn't result in gender parity among the country's elected officials. While 11 percent of the National Assembly elected in 1997 was female, that number increased to just 12 percent after the 2002 elections, to 19 percent after 2007, and to 27 percent after 2012.
How is that possible? While parties did field many more female candidates, they often did so in districts that they were likely to lose. (This would be like the Democratic Party, faced with a similar law, running female candidates for Senate in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas and male candidates in California, Washington, and Rhode Island. Of course, the comparison assumes that the national party has the ability to anoint candidates, as it does in France.) And the parties never even fully complied with the law, deliberately choosing to incur fines for fielding too many men rather than dislodging entrenched politicians.
The new mechanism of electing two candidates per district bypassed the problem of that previous law by ensuring that every single district is represented by a female councilor. And while this law does not apply to elections for the National Assembly (France's equivalent of our Congress), this dramatic increase in the number of women elected at the local level should affect the candidate pool for higher-level elections going forward. (The sitting government has also passed a number of other reforms meant to improve gender equality, including facilitating access to abortion services and promoting paternity leave.)
But the center-left was not able to reap any benefits from this change. With President François Hollande highly unpopular, his Socialist Party had been expecting a terrible defeat in these elections, and that's what it got. Left-wing parties controlled 61 of the country's 101 departments, but that number was halved on Sunday. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative party (the UMP) triumphed, and the map of France found itself colored blue, the color of the right in French elections.
Rather than propose a rundown of the electoral results, I want to highlight one particularly striking aspect of these elections: the birth of what is essentially a three-party system and the effect this is having on France's (mostly) "top two" electoral system.
The nationalist, anti-immigrant National Front (or FN, as its French acronym has it) has been a force in French political life for decades. But only very recently has a serious possibility emerged of the FN winning power—if not at the national level, then at least in lower-tier elections. For months, polls showed the FN getting between 25 and 30 percent of the vote in these departmental elections, dramatically heightening the stakes of the election's first round: If the center-right or the center-left ran too many candidates, they ran the risk of being entirely eliminated from the runoff.
The electoral procedure is as follows: The top two candidates make it to the runoff, as well as any other candidate who gets more than 12.5 percent of all registered voters. (As the turnout in local elections hovers around 50 percent, this means that the candidate who comes in third has to get around 25 percent of the vote to make it to the runoff.) Faced with the threat of elimination, the center-right prepared accordingly, unifying around one candidate in most districts, but the center-left did not. The Socialist Party and its traditional allies (the Communist Party and the Greens) often each fielded a candidate of their own.
The result was just brutal. In hundreds of districts, no left-wing candidate made it to one of the first two spots, leaving a right-wing candidate and a FN candidate to duel it out in the runoff. Take a look at the following two results:
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In both of these districts, the center-right barely made it to the runoff with the FN, while all left-wing candidates were eliminated. And this same scenario happened in hundreds of districts, often in friendly territory that the left expected to win.
This development was most jarring in the Nord, an area that covers France's northern tip and includes the city of Lille and the district of Faches-Thumesnil shown on the right. The left held a two-thirds majority on the outgoing council. But over and over again, divided left-wing candidates found themselves trailing the FN and a unified center-right. Despite controlling the department heading into Election Day, the left was completely eliminated from the runoff in 27 of the 41 districts. It was left to compete in just 14 districts, a third of the total.
The National Front, by contrast, made it to the runoff in 40 of 41 districts. In the runoff, the center-right candidates won every single one of these unexpected duels with the FN, and thereby won themselves the Nord.
That the FN failed to win a single seat in the Nord is indicative of the fact that it remains very difficult for it to attain 50 percent in head-to-head elections. This means that whichever party makes it against them in the runoff is likely to win. (Take the Nogent-sur-Oise district shown above at left. While the center-right pair got just 20 percent of the vote in the first round—that's 13 percent behind the FN and 27 percent behind the total of the three left-wing candidates—they still easily won the runoff.)
In some districts, it was the center-right that found itself shut out of the runoff, trailing both the left and the FN in the first round. But this happened much less systematically, and it did not significantly shift the balance of power in any department.
There are substantive reasons why left-wing parties that are often allied were fielding many candidates this time. Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls' austerity politics have created major fault lines within the ruling Socialist Party, let alone between the Socialist Party's dominant faction and the parties that it traditionally aligns with. Prominent figures were fired from cabinet positions last year for questioning their own government's policies, and the Green Party quit the ruling coalition altogether last spring. As such, it's hard to see how the left could have been more unified than it was absent an inflection in the government's economic orientation.
In any case, the left would have suffered a big loss whether or not it had been more unified in the first round. But the scope of its defeat was accentuated by its elimination in districts that it could have otherwise won.
This is an experience California Democrats are familiar with. In 2012, Democrats expected to win the newly designed and blue-leaning 31st Congressional District. But there were four Democrats on the ballot and only two Republicans, which allowed the latter to grab the top two spots and move on to the November general election. While Democrats picked up the district in 2014, that year they were very nearly shut out of the controller's race. That would have given the GOP its only statewide official in the Golden State, purely by fluke.
This new three-headed political configuration in France will likely experience a defining moment in the presidential election of 2017. With polls showing the FN's leader Marine Le Pen ahead in the first round but likely to lose in the runoff whomever she faces, the next president will probably be whichever candidate manages to grab the other runoff spot. (And in a country's whose presidential elections routinely see at least 10 candidates vie for attention, making it to the runoff doesn't necessarily require that many votes.)
These local elections are so concerning because they may well be a preview of the left's nightmare 2017 scenario: a runoff between conservative former President Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen.
If the left unites sufficiently, it would stand a good chance of making it to the runoff, either by shutting Sarkozy out of the runoff or by ensuring that the FN does not get the added exposure of a top two finish. But Hollande and Valls' alienation of many of the factions they need to win is making for a difficult path if the French left hopes to reconcile in time for 2017.
And while the underlying causes of disunity on the left might be different here, what happened in France should also serve as a powerful lesson to California Democrats.