Local elections à géométrie variable - French political parties prepare to get les municipales done
Tuesday 2 June marked the beginning of phase 2 of the easing of lockdown in France. (Tuesday, because Monday 1 June was the public holiday of Pentecôte - Whit Monday.) It was also the deadline for the submission of electoral lists for the second round of the municipal elections postponed from 22 March and now due on 28 June. There are about 5000 communes - mostly larger towns and cities - where the process has not yet been completed. In normal circumstances, the week between the two rounds would be marked by intense, but necessarily brief negotiations between local political états majors - either those left in the contest or even those eliminated whose support might still be sought. The Covid crisis has given candidates more time to reflect and discuss, but the picture is no less confused or confusing, with all sorts of different alliances appearing here and there. A géométrie variable indeed as Le Monde put it.
To resume rapidly, here are the headlines from the first round (see also figure 1 above):
Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche (LREM) and its allies did badly
The Rassemblement National (RN) consolidated its gains of 2014 but made no progress elsewhere and its national score was feeble
The right-wing Les Républicains (LR) were able to hold steady
The Ecologists (EELV) have been the big success story of the elections, at the heart of various left-wing alliances
The Socialists (PS) will probably hold Paris and, like Les Républicains, seem to have stabilised
Although a system of PR is used for communes above 1000 inhabitants, this is a majority system. The list that wins a relative majority in the run-off gets half the seats on the council, then the remaining seats are dished out among all the lists, proportionally.
In the European elections of May 2019, LREM came a creditable and surprising second to the RN and seemed to be in a position to pose a serious threat to the Socialist Anne Hidalgo for Paris city hall. But it fell apart - and reminded us all that European elections are a sign of not very much at all. After all, in 2009, the UMP lists took 28% of the vote nationwide (yes, I’m aware there are a bunch of caveats to throw in there), but otherwise Sarkozy’s party did badly in intermediate elections during his presidency. Since last May, LREM has consistently revised its expectations downwards and now just wants to get the thing done. That does not mean that the party is no longer involved. In fact it has a role to play in Paris, Bordeaux and Lyon, and PM Edouard Philippe still has an election to win at Le Havre. Otherwise, LREM is only in with a shout of taking the mairies of Aix-en-Provence, Besançon, and Strasbourg.
When he was elected in 2017, Macron sought to straddle the middle ground between centre-left and centre-right, but since then policy has been marked by a clear droitisation - drift to the right. And nowhere has this been more clearly underlined than in these elections, where the principal direction of travel for the run-offs is to cut deals with the republican right to see off the left. With one notable exception: in Lyon.
France’s second city is one of three where the election is a little more complicated than elsewhere. Like Paris, Lyon is subdivided into arrondissements, but voters there are electing not just a city council but also the members of the wider métropole de Lyon assembly. It is also the fiefdom of Gérard Collomb, the former Socialist who was one of the first political figures of note to rally to the candidate Macron. Mayor of Lyon from 2001 to 2017, senator also for the department of the Rhône, Collomb’s reward was to be appointed as Macron’s first interior minister, before resigning in October 2018, just before the Gilets Jaunes movement kicked off (a bullet well dodged). Returning to Lyon city hall, Collomb had set himself up as the LREM candidate to chair the greater Lyon council, with his protégé Yann Cucherat as candidate for the hôtel de ville. But then it all went wrong.
In the first round of the election, with just 16.5% Collomb’s official LREM list finished in fourth, well behind Bruno Bernard’s EELV list (22.6%) and tucked behind the LR’s François-Noël Buffet (17.7%) and a dissident LREM list led by his former associate David Kimelfeld (16.9%). In response to agreements struck by Bernard with various left-wing lists at city and métropole level, Collomb entered into an agreement with Buffet. Basically, Collomb has stood down for the greater Lyon authority in exchange for LR giving up the mairie to Cucherat… if their newly minted list wins. If the Greens and their allies take Lyon, it will be nothing less than momentous.
Collomb’s deal drew the fury of LREM heavyweights (such as they are). His crime is not so much to have cut a deal with Les Républicains - there are plenty of other towns and cities where this has happened, as we shall see - but because the deal comes with the blessing of Laurent Wauquiez, the highly macronincompatible LR president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region.
By contrast, the presidential party has absolutely no qualms about getting into bed with Les Républicains in Bordeaux. The city was governed by Alain Juppé from 1995 to 2004 and again from 2006 until he resigned in March 2019 to take up his seat on the Constitutional Council. His successor as mayor was his long-time associate Nicolas Florian, but it is also worth remembering that PM Philippe was a juppéiste and the LR bordelais is a very different beast to its lyonnais counterpart. In fact, there were already supporters of the presidential majority on Florian’s Majorité Municipale list in the form of MoDem and Agir candidates, so there was no great surprise when LREM’s Thomas Cazenave (12.7%) announced that he was throwing in his lot with Florian. The result will be tight. Florian was just a whisker ahead (34.6% to 34.4%) of Ecologist Pierre Hurmic’s broad left-wing alliance stretching from EELV to the Radicaux de Gauche, the Parti Socialiste, the Communists and other smaller left-wing parties. Absent from Hurmic’s Bordeaux Respire! list was the local La France Insoumise (LFI), who opted instead to stand with Philippe Poutou of the Noveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) that took nearly 12%. Like Lyon, Bordeaux could go either way.
This sort of patchwork of variable alliances is the staple diet of French municipal elections, especially with two rounds of voting and the merging of lists between elections permitted. It’s also a feature that lists will take a name that acts as an umbrella for the various parties on the list - for example Florian’s Majorité Municipale in Bordeaux. Le Monde has produced a very serviceable set of thumbnail outlines to the situation in France’s larger towns, available here, though behind a paywall. Academic readers with access to Nexis should be able to access it for free. I want, then, for the rest of this entry to just cover a handful of other cases.
The failure of both LREM and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National has left space for others to fill, most obviously the Ecologists and various left-wing parties. In some instances, even the PS has made something of a recovery. In cities like Nantes and Rennes, PS-led lists did well in their own right, before merging with the Greens for the second round. To a certain extent, the parties have used the first round as a primary. Therein, however, lies part of the problem for the PS - holding onto power without yielding too much to the Ecologists. In some towns this has been managed, in others not so much.
In Lille, for example, Martine Aubry, Socialist mayor since 2001 in alliance with the Greens, has refused any alliance with them for the second round. For her, their demands after an impressive first round were too much and she accuses them of focussing too much on les centres villes and not enough on les quartiers populaires. For them, her snide remarks at their expense have become rather wearing and she represents a form of politics whose time has gone. Aubry took a shade under 30% of the first round vote, but Stéphane Baly’s EELV took 24.5%, compared to just 11% in the first round in 2014. The result in Lille will come down to electors voting against the candidate they do not want rather than for the one they do. It is worth also noting, en passant, that the RN vote in Lille this time was under 7% compared to 17% in 2014.
Meanwhile, the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) has also held on to its local electorates and can look forward to 28 June with some optimism. As Figure 1 above shows, the PCF is still streets ahead of Les Insoumis when it comes to bums on municipal council seats.
It is a little early to talk about the return of the old parties, but just as the roots of the PS and PCF in local elections still run deep, so too Les Républicians had a good day on 15 March and are well placed, either in their own right, or in alliance with parties of the presidential majority as outlined above. In Nice, for example, Christian Estrosi, the outgoing mayor who went down with Covid-19 just after the first round, goes into the run-off against a Rassemblement National list led by Philippe Vardon that has no chance of pulling off an upset. Putative presidential candidate François Baroin was re-elected mayor of Troyes in the first round with 67% of the votes cast for his list.
Marseille is the only place where the right is in a difficult position of its own making. Like Paris and Lyon, Marseille is subdivided into electoral wards, here known as secteurs, and voters are electing their representatives to the local and city assemblies, as well as the greater Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolitan authority.
La cité phocéenne, as Marseille is known, has reached a watershed moment in its politics with the retirement of Jean-Claude Gaudin. Mayor since 1995, senator for the Bouches-du-Rhône since 1997, deputy before that and member of the city council since at least 1965 (not to mention a raft of other local and national offices), his decision to step down at the age of 81 marked the end of le système Gaudin. The problem for the right is that his departure has crystallised two camps within LR and among its allies: those who see themselves as Gaudin’s heirs and those who want to sweep away the inheritance. The former are represented by the official LR list, headed by Martine Vassal (who took 22.3% of the vote), the latter by senator Bruno Gilles, who led a dissident LR list in the first round and, with nearly 11% of the vote, has insisted on his right to stand in the second despite calls to unite against the ‘red peril’ facing the city, a reference not only to the presence of Jean-Luc Mélenchon as one of its deputies, but an echo of the old bloc politics designed to prevent the PCF taking control. Indeed, Gaudin himself stood on just such a list in 1965, headed by Gaston Defferre, the Socialist but staunchly anti-Communist mayor of Marseille from 1953 until his death in 1986.
Vassal in fact did not finish in first place in the first round. That honour went to Michèle Rubirola at the head of a broad left-wing list called Printemps Marseillais, with 23.44% of the vote. Another left-wing list, Debout Marseille, took just 8% across the city, but has merged with Rubirola’s list. Attempts to persuade her to take on board LREM senator and PS dissident Samia Ghali failed, however, when negotiations broke down on both sides, with the risk being that the RN’s Stéphane Ravier could well pick up seats in Marseille’s 8th district as a consequence. As in Lyon and Paris, the balance between the political forces across the city and in each district is fine.
As I mentioned above, the RN’s results this time out have been mediocre. In 2014 they made some real gains and were encouraged by the 2015 regional elections, by Marine Le Pen’s first round performance in 2017 and last year’s European elections. But they have not pushed on (see Figure 2 below). While seven of the nine towns they controlled have been held already, two more look difficult (the southern towns of Tarascon and Carpentras).
The most high-profile RN case is down in Perpignan, where Louis Aliot, Le Pen’s former partner, leads from the first round. Aliot first stood there in 2008, when his list took 10% of the vote in the first round. Six years later that rose to 34% in the first round and 44% in the second. This time he has 35% from the first round, very nearly double that of Jean-Marc Pujol, the outgoing LR mayor of the city. Faced with the possibility of Aliot finally taking Perpignan, all but Pujol’s list have withdrawn in a broad anti-RN front. All the same, the announcement by one of the candidates on the now-withdrawn LREM list that she would vote Aliot has been an embarrassment.
Otherwise, there has been little in these elections to cheer the RN leadership struggling to put their legal and financial problems to one side and to make any headway during the Covid-19 crisis. The time may come for Le Pen to make hay from the government’s discomfort when the parliamentary enquiries into the handling of the crisis in both the National Assembly and Senate start, but for the time being she has been unable to gain much traction.
And then there is Paris… A suivre
Fig 2 - Communes where the Rassemblement National is able to run in the second round. - From Laurent de Boissieu/La Croix