Town hall seeks man, white, preferably with a lengthy CV of his election history. Despite the stated objectives of both major political parties in France, that remains the typical mayoral candidate who will be standing at France's local elections that take place over two rounds, beginning on Sunday, 23rd March. An examination by Mediapart of the lists of candidates put forward by the ruling Socialist Party and the main opposition party the UMP in large towns - those with populations of more than 30,000 – shows that attempts to feminise the face of local politics still have a long way to go.
Gender parity – except when it comes for the candidate to be mayor
The first disappointing finding concerns male-female parity of candidates. Parity between male and female candidates was already obligatory for local elections at the last polls in 2008 for towns with more than 3,500 inhabitants and this has been extended for 2014 to include all towns or large villages with a population of more than a 1,000. In total 85% of all French voters will be confronted by lists with equal numbers of male and female candidates to be a local councillor. However they will end up electing very few women mayors.
According to a study by the French equality body, the Haut Conseil à l’égalité entre les femmes et les hommes (HCEFH), electoral parity “ends at the point that power begins”. In the French system of voting for local councils the top name on a party's list of candidates is the person who becomes mayor if that list wins. And at this election 83% of the heads of the lists on communes and inter-communal bodies are male. Moreover, this figure has scarcely changed since the last elections. In 2008 the percentage of women at the top of lists was 16.5%, against 17.1% this year. The HCEFH points out that six years ago just 13.8% of the mayors elected were women.
If one looks just at towns with more than 30,000 inhabitants, and if one focuses only on the lists of the PS or UMP, then women still make up under 20% of the mayoral candidates. In the PS's case 19% of their lists are headed by women, for the UMP the figure is 17%. Yet these are the towns where the larger parties have greater numbers of members and activists – and thus women – to call on.
In major cities the PS does somewhat better, though it is far from exemplary; in the largest 15 cities 27% of its lists are headed by women. In four of them, Lille, Nantes, Rennes and Paris, they have a very good chance of being elected. And apart from former PS first secretary Martine Aubry, who has been mayor of Lille since 2001, all would become mayor for the first time. Nantes and Rennes are examples of where the PS has set an example; in each case a man standing down as mayor chose a young woman to replace him. In Nantes it is Johanna Rolland, who is 34, while in Rennes it is 37-year-old Nathalie Appéré.
The UMP situation is worse than that of the socialists. Among the 15 largest cities just three women candidates top the list for the UMP. There are some bright spots, for in Nantes the UMP has chosen 35-year-old Laurence Garnier, while the party has hopes of Fabienne Keller becoming mayor in Strasbourg. There is also the example of former government minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet – usually called 'NKM' - in Paris, where she is involved in what some sections of the media rather patronisingly call the 'battle of the ladies' with socialist Anne Hidalgo to be mayor of the French capital. And for Paris's 20 arrondissements – or districts – both the UMP and PS candidates have produced perfect parity in each of the lists, ten women, ten men. But these exceptions hide the reality elsewhere. For example in France's second city Marseille there is a typical example of the old guard staying in place; 74-year-old UMP candidate Jean-Claude Gaudin has been mayor for 18 years and is seeking his fourth mandate.
Primary elections – the best way to promote new candidates?
It is difficult to assess the real impact of primaries to choose candidates to be mayor, as so few of them were held for this year's elections. The PS organised fewer than ten across France, and these often suffered from a very low level of participation from eligible voters. Yet where they were held, they did sometimes lead to new faces emerging. In Marseille the socialist primary at least allowed the PS to avoid some of the clientelism from which it has suffered locally in the past, and showed that a government minister – Marie-Arlette Carlotti – could be beaten. In Aix-en-Provence, also in the south of France, the primary led to two party veterans in their sixties making it through to the final round, beating two younger candidates. But it also removed two local party 'barons' from the reckoning.
The most spectacular examples of where primaries helped promote new faces were in Le Havre and La Rochelle. In Le Havre in north-west France the winner of the PS primary was Camille Galap, a university dean who based his campaign on the need to renew politics, on campaigning in working class areas and on the support of local civic groups. He was elected in preference to the head of the town council's opposition and is the only black person who is at the top of a PS list among towns with populations of more than 100,000.
In La Rochelle the winner of the PS primary was 34-year-old teacher Anne-Laure Jaumouillié, who beat the established figure of Jean-François Fountaine, 62, the vice-president of the Greater La Rochelle council and also president of the federation of marine industries; La Rochelle has a large port and there are many shipbuilders and marine-related businesses in the area. Yet at Béziers in the south of France and Boulogne-Billancourt to the west of Paris the primary elections saw local party bigwigs win through.
The UMP, meanwhile, staged just a handful of primaries. The most high-profile was in Paris where Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet was chosen in the first round, picking up 58.16% of the vote against three men. Among those defeated was the party's Parisian 'baron' Jean-François Legaret, who has been mayor of the capital’s 1st arrondissement since 2001 and who is president of the UMP group on the Paris council. He received just 20.40% of the vote.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
However, younger female UMP members who took part in the primary in the major city of Lyon in east France fared poorly. Former junior health minister Nora Berra and 44-year-old lawyer Myriam Pleynard picked up less than 10% of the votes between them and were eliminated in the first round. And at Colombes north-west of Paris it was 76-year-old Nicole Goueta, who had been mayor from 2001 to 2008, who won the primary election, and who is now taking on the socialist, Philippe Sarre, who beat her six years ago. “It's certainly proof that the UMP has a problem in renewing itself,” says the PS's national secretary for elections Christophe Borgel.
The UMP MP Thierry Solère, who supported one of the defeated candidates at the Boulogne-Billancourt UMP primary, is also critical of the “dogma that says that you automatically choose a current mayor to stand again”. He says: “It's a pyramidal top-down decision in a society that isn't like that. There is a real problem with the post-1968 [editor's note, year of major student-led protests in France] generation who think they still have a future and cling on. It's old white men who decide. And they re-elect each other.”
Long-serving mayors
In January, as the French Parliament was voting on the new law to limit politicians from holding more than one major elected post at a time, Mediapart examined an aspect missing from the legislation - limiting how long someone can hold the same position. The results of the investigation showed that more than half of the mayors in the 428 French towns and cities with more 20,000 inhabitants were seeking a third, fourth or fifth term of office – and in some cases more.
Among the 239 socialist mayors standing for another term some are seeking their seventh term of office, for example Laurent Cathala at Créteil, south-east of Paris, and Alain Richard at Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône north-west of the capital. Meanwhile Gilles Catoire at Clichy north-west of Paris is looking for a sixth term, while Michel Delebarre at Dunkirk in north-west France is one of several hoping to be mayor for the fifth time. On the Right, meanwhile, Marc-Philippe Daubresse at Lambersart in northern France, André Santini at Issy-les-Moulineaux south-west of Paris and Philippe Marini at Compiègne in the north of France are all seeking a sixth term of office.
When it comes to just those towns with more than 30,000 inhabitants the tendency for long-serving mayors drops a little – down to 40% seeking a third or more term of office - but is still very apparent. Camille Bedin, 28, a candidate at Nanterre north-west of Paris and deputy secretary general of the UMP, accepts that her party “needs a new lease of life and profound renewal”. She hopes that the party will look at the issues both of multiple mandates and of how many terms of office someone should serve once this year's local and European elections are out of the way.
Former interior minister Brice Hortefeux, who also sits on the UMP's candidate selection committee, says of the nomination process: “There is no absolute rule, it's done case by case. There is a balance to be struck between the safety of experience and the boldness of renewal. Between the desire for renewal and electoral popularity, which is rather in favour of those who have been there a while.”
Best not to be too young...
Unsurprisingly, mayors tend to be older than the average age of the population. Some 26% of PS candidates at the top of the list and 29% of UMP mayoral candidates are over 60. This is slightly over the proportion of elderly people in the population, which currently stands at 23.5% according to statistical agency INSEE. However the biggest discrepancy is in the representation of the young. Out of the 260 towns with populations above 30,000, the UMP only has 11 candidates under 30 at the top of their list, while the PS has just seven. And in general they are in unwinnable areas. For example, the PS have put forward 22-year-old Bastien Marguerite as head of their list at Meaux, north-east of Paris, the stronghold of the UMP president Jean-François Copé.
“There is a lack of desire from political organizations on these issues,” agrees Christophe Borgel. “We are absolutely not making room for young people. The age of our leaders is higher overall that in other European countries.” The socialist MP notes that the UMP “has not brought through a new generation at local level as it has done at the national level”. This view is shared by Camille Breton at the UMP, who accepts “the Right hasn't been able to prepare” for handing over to a new generation locally because “under Sarkozy the party was especially focused on national matters”.
The age of mayors is not, though, an issue for Brice Hortefeux, who wants to “leave the maximum amount of freedom to electors” and thinks that “only the desire” counts when it comes to candidates. “There are candidates who are already tired at 52,” says Hortefeux, who is vice-president of the UMP. “Contrary to the nonsense that is often peddled, an elderly person will automatically vote for a younger candidate. Because faced with an older candidate the elector tells his or herself 'I've stopped working, why hasn’t he?'” However, on this kind of reasoning 74-year-old Jean-Claude Gaudin in Marseille would have been defeated long ago.
Career politicians
Back in January 2013 the right-wing MP Válerie Pécresse laid out at a committee meeting the necessary conditions to create the “blue wave” - blue is the party's colour – that the UMP wants to produce in local elections. To win over the maximum number of towns, she said, they had to unearth “new talent”, particularly from civic societies, and take the time to train them. All the UMP leaders present agreed. Yet once again these promises have not been applied when it comes to mayoral candidates. The overwhelming majority of UMP mayoral candidates in towns with more than 30,000 inhabitants have already held one or more political term of office. Some 40% of these have been in Parliament while eleven heads of lists are former government ministers, and 52% have previous served as councillor in a département – broadly equivalent to a county - or region.
The figures are lower with the Socialist Party; just a fifth of the heads of their lists have served as an MP or a senator, for example. The UMP MP Thierry Solère believes the difference between the parties is explained by the fact that “the Right has been in power for a long time”. He says: “The PS has had the time to prepare locally, so it's only natural that they should have more new people heading their lists.” When they were in opposition the PS also gradually seized control of local authorities – départements, regions, towns – which enabled them to bring through a whole new generation of politicians who had never served in national positions.
Enlargement : Illustration 5
Meanwhile, the UMP not only chooses to select outgoing mayors automatically as their new candidate, in 11 areas the party has also chosen former mayors who were beaten at previous local elections in 2001 or 2008. This is the case, for example, with Fabienne Keller in Strasbourg, Jean-Luc Moudenc in Toulouse and Élisabeth Hermanville in Goussainville.
Not much diversity either
The predominance of older, white men among the mayoral candidates does not just exclude many women – it also restricts the diversity of the lists of candidates. The vast majority of mayoral candidates from both the UMP and the PS are white, apart from those lists in areas considered unwinnable by one or other of the parties.
According to a study by the federation of black and Afro-Caribbean associations in France the Conseil représentatif des associations noires de France (CRAN) and the think tank Republic et diversité, which examined the composition of the current municipal councils in the 50 biggest towns and cities in France, just 9% of the assistant mayors are “non-whites”. In fact 12 of those councils have no councillors of North African black or Asian background at all, making them “'apartheid' municipal councils” as far as CRAN president Louis-Georges Tin is concerned.
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English version by Michael Streeter