Not only is the debacle suffered by France’s Socialist Party in the legislative elections even greater than any of its electoral defeats of the past, it is also different to any other by its very nature. It is the collapse of a major party of government.
This phenomenon, which is quite rare in the history of Western democracies, has never led to a return of a party’s previous status. Quite the opposite, it has generally contributed to a lasting modification of the political scene in the countries where it has occurred. If one bases oneself on the experience of these precedents, the most likely future for the French Socialist Party is that it will eke out an existence as a sort of occasional complimentary political force within a transformed partisan system, unless it dissolves itself into one or more larger political formations.
US political science scholar and writer Charles S. Mack dedicated a book on the subject of the collapse of major parties, meaning those which are – or rather, were – capable of regularly coming to power to lead government either alone or as part of a coalition. In his book When Political Parties Die, Mack takes the case of the mid-19th-century US Whig Party, which was incapable of reaching internal agreement on the issues of slavery and immigration, leading to its replacement by the Republican Party. He also cites the British Liberal Party, which paid the price of being too slow to adapt to the extension of the vote among the working classes, and its divisions over the Irish nationalist movement, by being overtaken by the Labour Party in the 1920s. There is also the example of the 1993 collapse of Canada’s now forgotten Progressive Conservative Party, which occurred in the context of an economic downturn and conflict between Quebec and the four western provinces.
If Mack also looks at the fall in the early 1990s of the Christian Democracy party in Italy, it is above all to underline its singular character because of the disintegration of the country’s entire partisan system.
Beyond from the examples he presents, the history of the French Parti Radical (Radical Party) could have provided him with another interesting case. Faced with the decline of the independent middle classes and the religious divisions, caught in the vice of political bipolarization in the period 1958-1962, amid the founding of the Fifth Republic and the end of the Algerian war of independence, the movement went into a slow but certain decline, ending up split in two and transformed into satellites of the governing parties of the Fifth Republic.
The case of the replacement of the Greek socialist party PASOK as the country’s dominating force on the Left by the radical-left Syriza party, in the context of the Greek debt crisis, occurred after Mack’s book was first published, but it too could have otherwise been a subject for his study. But if one is looking at the history of democracies established since at least 1945, other examples are difficult to find.
So just what are the special circumstances in which parties implode? Apart from inevitable differences between the existing cases, there is nevertheless a recurrent scenario. In every case, failing party leaders have found themselves out of step with their electoral base, either regarding crucial national issues or because of sociological changes affecting their base of support. Another common feature is the existence of other partisan groups which are situated with a similar ideological perspective and which are not too worn down by the exercise of power. Once this explosive cocktail is established, not only do voters abandon the party in question, but also even its electoral hard core.
Mack argues that this phenomenon is essential in explaining the difference between an ordinary political defeat and the collapse of a party. In order to remain a major party of government, there must be a core of the electorate which stays loyal to it through all occasions, and that core must be of a sufficient size for a party to carry on being a credible political rival even after defeat. It is the preservation and renewal of this electoral core that large parties reproduce their domination of the political scene. It was in this manner that the French Socialist Party bounced back from its landslide defeat at the hands of the conservatives and centre-right in legislative elections in 1993; with a 17.5% share of the vote, it continued to be the principal force for alternation with the Right. In Britain, this balance was kept between the Labour Party and the Conservative Party despite the long periods that both spent in opposition (18 years for the first, 13 years for the second). There are many such examples.
But in the rare cases where the core of a party’s electoral support was lost to a new political force or another that was previously minor, it has lost its status, and no such case has witnessed a subsequent return to normal. That is precisely the situation that the French Socialist Party (PS) now finds itself in, and which meets all the criteria set out by Mack.
Following its poor showing in the presidential elections, the legislative elections have confirmed that the PS has become abandoned by its electoral grass roots. As a single party, that is, without counting the score of its traditional small allies, the PS garnered just 7.5% of the vote in the first round on Sunday, which is less than the previous record low of a socialist party, that of its ancestor, the SFIO (French Section of the Workers’ International), which garnered 10% in 1906, just one year after its creation.
Above all, the PS has lost its previous status as the largest party of the Left, after it was well distanced in both the presidential result and the first round of the legislative elections by the radical-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed). Consequently, it is certain to lose its position as the premier opposition force in the National Assembly, the lower house, which it has occupied, when not in power, since 1962. There is every chance that if ever it manages to return enough MPs to form a political group in parliament, it would be largely made up of those candidates who have declared themselves sympathetic to President Emmanuel Macron’s movement, and thus producing a group that gravitates around the government rather than being in opposition to it.
Among those PS candidates who will survive the second round on June 18th, many will owe their seats to the tactical choice of Macron’s LREM party not to field a rival candidate in their constituency. The others – those few PS candidates who may scrape through despite the odds – will represent but a few drops of water in an ocean of obsolescence. Even those socialist candidates who once appeared the most solid, including some who won their seat outright in the first round of the last legislative elections in 2012 (i.e. having obtained more than 50% of the vote), have been struck by the massive backfire. They include Jérôme Lambert, who in 2012 won his seat in the Charente département (county) in south-west France on a 54.2ù share of the vote and who, after scoring just half that on Sunday, now faces losing it in the second-round playoff next weekend. The debacle was most severe in the cities and towns, such as the meagre 7% of the vote that went to Michel Destot in Grenoble, south-east France, where he had been MP since 1988 (and mayor between 1995 and 2014). In constituencies most anchored to the Right, socialist candidates last Sunday suffered humiliating scores, as low as 2% (recorded in the Haute-Savoie département in eastern France).
Last year was decisive in the collapse of socialist support
The chronology of this decomposition of the PS’s core electorate is instructive. It held together up until the regional elections in 2015. While it is true that the poor results the PS recorded in local elections under the 2012-2017 presidency of François Hollande was a heavy punishment for the party in power, and also revealed a progressive national unravelling of its territorial bases, nothing appeared to indicate the current annihilation of the PS. It was quite rational that the leadership of the party, which remained the dominant force of the Left, anticipated a defeat in national elections and a subsequent five years in opposition. The period between 1992 and 1994 when the party suffered disastrous successive defeats in regional, legislative and European Parliament elections was followed by the return to power of the ‘pluralist Left’ in 1997 and decisive victory in local elections the following decade.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
It is clear that the situation has changed. Last year was marked by two reforms proposed by the socialist government. One, which was later abandoned, was the proposal to enshrine in the constitution the stripping of French nationality from those convicted of terrorist crimes. The notion of stripping someone of their nationality ran counter-current to the cultural liberalism of not only the Socialist Party electorate but also that of all of the Left. At the time, Emmanuel Macron, who served as Hollande’s economy minister from 2014 until August 2016, when he launched his presidential bid, distanced himself from the move, and has underlined the fact since.
The other reform was that of the labour market, characterised by a loosening up of employment regulations and which represented another rupture with social and doctrinal compromises that the PS had until then maintained. The resulting protest movements against the reform, to which the government led by Manuel Valls turned a deaf ear, led to a transfer of support of many of those angry at the reform to the alternative, radical-left represented by La France Insoumise leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
“There is an element that can be added to Mack’s model, namely that of the disappearance of an indentified adversary,” comments Pierre Martin, a lecturer specialized in electoral affairs with the Grenoble political science school (Sciences Po Grenoble). From the beginning of Hollande’s presidency, the socialist government repeatedly legitimised, in its language and reasoning , a neoliberal view of the French economy. In itself, that might have had few consequences if it was not for the emergence amid the presidential election campaign of Emmanuel Macron and his pro-business party, which was built with haste but professionalism. How could Hollande and his allies, who had themselves promoted his ascension and given credit to his economic ideas, find an alternative doctrine with which to oppose him?
The electorate that was outraged at the performance of the socialist government during its latter phase had, in Macron to the Right and Mélenchon to the Left, two effective and mobilising political entrepreneurs to choose from, both of them much more coherent than the socialist leaders who had become politically inaudible. In this regard, the score attained by the PS presidential candidate Benoît Hamon was not an accident that can be attributed to him and his team. The suggestion that there was a slumbering socialist electorate that could prevent Macron from obtaining a majority was a fable. As soon as the advent of elections allowed, the hard core of the PS electorate largely abandoned it. Even if one must also read into this the effects of three decades of decay of socialist circles and networks, and which is now to the benefit of short-term electoralism, the concordant facts demonstrate that the last 18 months of the socialist government became the decisive moment in the party’s collapse.
The debacle in the urns, and therefore the drastic reduction in numbers of MPs, will see the PS suffer a colossal loss of public funding that is provided to political parties, sums that are relative to their size. But it will also lose any remaining unity, which can only be maintained in the absence of a shared common policy programme, by the perspective of returning to power. When that is no longer the prospect, it will also lose credibility as a political force. In the cases cited by Mack, the parties that were destroyed often splintered into several movements as well as melting into other more dynamic political forces. Some managed to keep going, like the British Liberal Party which became the Liberal Democrats after merging in 1988 with the Social Democratic Party (itself established in 1981 by several leading Labour Party figures who rebelled against its pronounced swing to the Left). But none returned to a previous position of being a major alternative force for government on its own.
As Mack points out, the legislative election systems in which a single candidate is elected by attaining the majority of votes, dubbed ‘first-past-the-post’, (which in Britain and the US is held in one single round, and in France over two rounds), are particularly penalising. The candidate who can no longer qualify for the first, or leading, place(s) is destined for a marginal or subsidiary role. Proportional representation, on the other hand, gives a greater chance for a political recovery (even though the example of Greece urges caution, and that of the Netherlands demands further monitoring). The bad news for the French Socialist Party is that the Macron government, which will likely remain largely the same after the final round of the legislative polls when it is expected to win a massive parliamentary majority, appears in no hurry to introduce a reform of the electoral system in France.
-------------------------
Fabien Escalona is a political scientist and researcher with the University of Grenoble, specialised in the study of European social democracy. A regular contributor to Mediapart, he is the author of several analysis articles on the French presidential and legislative elections.
-------------------------
- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse