The socialists' vote only “held up well” in their imagination
French prime minister Manuel Valls relishes the public relations game. Even when he is in a political hole, his talent for PR helps him save face. For election night, at least. On Sunday evening the results of the first round of voting in France's local département or 'county' elections should have come across as a nightmare for the prime minister. Yet by anticipating the outcome, by choosing to put himself on the front line and by dramatising the election, Valls shrugged off the result as if it were instead merely a daydream.
In the build-up to the election Manuel Valls had rolled up his sleeves and gone out on the campaign trail in person, determined to “stigmatise the FN” - the far-right Front National – as the main electoral opponent. However, the outcome was that his Socialist Party (PS) scored just 21.78% of the vote, saw its candidates eliminated in the first round in a little over 500 cantons (out of a total of around 2,000) and now stands to lose control of between 20 and 40 département councils - out of a total of a hundred - in next Sunday's second round of voting. Meanwhile the Front National picked up around 25% (the precise figure was 25.24%) of the vote for the second election in a row, following last year’s European polls.
Yet in a television appearance on Sunday evening Manuel Valls said he was “delighted” that the abstention rate was a little lower than many had forecast. Perhaps Vall's campaign interventions did contribute to the turnout, which at 50.17% was higher than for the last cantonal elections in 2011. However, this higher turnout scarcely did the socialist government any favours. Even so, the prime minister was pleased, because he seeks to look beyond simply the performance of the PS. As far as Manuel Valls was concerned, it was thanks to his involvement in the election that the “Republican groupings held firm” - in other words mainstream parties, not the FN – and that the “FN is not the leading party this evening”. To this mood of warlike self-congratulation he added portentously: “When you mobilise the French people, it works.” Critics will say it was an odd definition of “working”; for example, in the Corbeil canton of the Essonne département south-west of Paris, where Valls himself was voted in as an MP in 2012, the candidate of the Left was knocked out in the first round. And in nearby Évry, where Valls was once mayor, the Left's candidate will be taking part in next Sunday's second round after a first round that saw a turnout of just 37% of the electorate.
As the election night unfolded on Sunday, some curious labelling of the various parties by the ministry of the interior – who oversee election results – made it seem as if the Left was more united than it really was. For example, the public broadcaster France 2 spent much of its televised coverage of the election aftermath noting that the “PS and and smaller left-wing parties” had scored 28% of the vote. Yet the reality was that in many areas these smaller “left-wing parties” were in fact the radical left Front de Gauche and the Greens – who were competing against the PS. It was only later in the evening that the ministry corrected its labelling, putting the PS on just over 21%, with the rest of the various strands of the Left picking up close to 15%.
The Greens, who were credited with just 2% of the vote, even though in a quarter of the cantons or voting areas they were closer to 10%, have been reduced to a minor political force that seems to have little other choice than to put its wider ambitions on hold and rejoin the government. As for the Front de Gauche, it attained some 6.1% of the vote, though at least around a third of its candidates were included under the label “smaller left-wing parties”. In fact it is impossible to translate these election figures accurately to a national level, given the many and various different alignments that took place at a local level.
Speaking on Mediapart's election night coverage, academic Fabien Escalona, an expert on political parties at Sciences Po Grenoble, neatly summed up the socialists' current situation and the carving up of the different roles among those who lead it. “There is some sincerity in the PS's desire to fight against the FN and, moreover, it does mobilise people,” he said. “If [PS first secretary] Jean-Christophe Cambadélis has been warning since 2012 about the threat of the FN and of a tripartite system [editor's note, referring to the Left, the traditional Right and the far-right], it's to call on other parties of the Left to support the PS. With Manuel Valls, it's different. His strategic aim is to change the PS's ideological core and its system of alliances.” The prime minister likes to see himself as the guarantor of the French Republic more than of socialism.
In calling on “each person to adopt a clear stance and to call for a vote for the republican candidate of the Left, or of the Right, when they are standing alone against the extreme right” in the second round of voting, Manuel Valls is urging a vote for the UMP where they are going head-to-head with the FN. Or for one of the 'republican' candidates to stand down when there is a three-way contest involving the FN. Jean-Christophe Cambadélis has gone even further, calling on left-wing candidates to “withdraw”, though only where “the Left cannot compete”. People will have to work out exactly what that means.
In any case, Cambadélis had clearly decided in advance how he would sum up Sunday evening's electoral events. According to him the “themes advanced by the socialists have been bolstered by the first round”. Though in his statement the party's first secretary was careful not to say which themes. His socialist colleague Claude Bartolone, who is president of the National Assembly, adopted a tone that was half-solemn and half-pompous. “It was a first round of resistance. The socialists have held their ground in the first round.” Though clearly, added Bartolone, the socialists would have “resisted better if all of the Left and the greens had joined with the socialists everywhere”. To make sure no one misunderstood his point, he added: “It's the PS that has to be the focal point for this indispensable rallying together.”
“The Left must now come together,” Manuel Valls himself said during his comments on Sunday evening, even though in many people's eyes it is he who has helped divide the Left for the past three years. But for the prime minister that is not the real issue. For in the imaginary world of the socialists there is no alternative to the policies they are adopting. There is silence in the ranks. And all is going well.
On the right, a victory for unity eclipses Nicolas Sarkozy success
Commenting on Sunday night's voting figures, former president Nicolas Sarkozy saw in them a “profound desire for a clear change”. And it is this change that the new president of the UMP wants to represent. In picking up 29.39% of the vote, the UMP's alliance with the centrist UDI came top in the first round of the département elections. At least 67 UMP councillors were elected in the first round, plus 27 from the UDI and 115 others standing under various right-wing labels. For Sarkozy, all the “conditions for a massive swing in favour of the Right and of the centre” are now in place in a “great number of départements”. But the leader of the opposition publicly played down his own role in the alliance’s successes, leaving it instead to his trusty lieutenants to talk up his personal achievement.
“It's a fine blue wave and it's a great victory for Nicolas Sarkozy,” the UMP senator Pierre Charon told Le Monde. “It's undeniably a victory for him because it's the first stage in the reconstruction that he is carrying out,” said the UMP's general secretary Laurent Wauquiez. Meanwhile a party official gave Marianne magazine some insight into Sarkozy's true state of mind. “He was euphoric. He thinks that he has won and sees it as a personal victory.” Four months after his election as head of the UMP, Sarkozy knows he can count on his flag bearers to do the PR for him and endorse his strategy of having an “uninhibited” Right. This lack of inhibition in tackling controversial subjects was shown last week when Sarkozy stepped into the row over whether school canteens should offer menus that cater for religious groups – in this case Muslims.
“A change in power is on its way and nothing will stop it!” the former president declared confidently on Sunday evening. However, as academic Fabien Escalona told Mediapart during its election night coverage, the Right's performance was only a “relative success”. Between them the conservative Right and the centre had picked up 32% of the vote during similar elections in 2011 and 40% at the corresponding polls in 2008. So the weekend’s figures suggest that the performance of the centre-right alliance is stable, or even slightly down. As it is in opposition against an unpopular government, this gives it an automatic advantage over the Left.
In private Nicolas Sarkozy insists that the first round outcome has confirmed his own calculations. The man who justified his return to French politics by explaining that he was the only person able to hold back the far right is taking great delight in the results. His supporters claim that victory is even sweeter as, in their eyes, it discredits the approach adopted by his internal opponents in the party, starting with the mayor of Bordeaux Alain Juppé. “This victory vindicates Nicolas Sarkozy's strategy and shows all his rivals are wrong,” Pierre Charon told Le Monde.

Enlargement : Illustration 3

Yet it was above all the alliance with the centre, the UDI but also the centrist MoDem, a policy strongly backed by Juppé for months, that carried the day on Sunday. By allying itself with the UDI in 80% of the cantons or voting areas, the UMP was part of a “republican Right” that stood united against a divided Left. “I will continue to make the unity and the coming together of our political family our priority,” Sarkozy said on Sunday evening. “In the eyes of the French people this unity is an essential condition for producing the alternative republican government that they look forward to.”
Alain Juppé, meanwhile, was determined to highlight the “inanity of the Front National programme”, as he congratulated the centre-right alliance’s “fine victory”. The mayor of Bordeaux, who has already announced he will be one of the candidates in the UMP's primary election to choose a presidential candidate for 2017, and who is keen to underline his differences with Nicolas Sarkozy, said on Sunday: “It seems very clearly that the only credible alternative source of power today is precisely this alliance, this coming together of the Right and the centre.” For while Sarkozy was quick to rule out any local or national electoral deal with the FN's leaders, his move towards political territory that is the FN's natural terrain has lain down a strong marker.
On Monday the UMP's political committee met to set out the party's strategy for the week leading up to Sunday’s second round of voting. But Nicolas Sarkozy has already made clear there will be no calls to vote for a left-wing candidate in contests where no one from the UMP-UDI alliance is standing. “In those cantons in which our candidates will not be present for the second round, which will not be many, the UMP will not call on people to vote either for the Front National, with whom we have nothing in common, or for the candidate of the Left, whose policies we oppose,” he said, confirming what is known in French as the “ni-ni” or “neither one nor the other” strategy. This was the approach adopted by the UMP for the February parliamentary by-election at Doubs in eastern France, in which the party's candidate was eliminated in the first round. An estimated half of the UMP's supporters then voted for the FN candidate in the second round.
Another key issue for the UMP to deal with will be the so-called 'third round' of the local elections on Thursday April 2nd, when the newly-elected councillors meet to elect the chairman of the council. “There will be several difficult départements,” a member of the UMP's political committee admitted to Mediapart. “But we will do all we can to ensure that no [council chairman] will be elected thanks to FN votes. We can't allow that. At worst we'll lose two or three départements.”
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English versions by Michael Streeter