The surge in support for the far-right Front national, who narrowly failed to win a high-profile parliamentary by-election on Sunday, has led to considerable soul-searching among mainstream political parties in France. Though the right-wing UMP's Jean-Louis Costes won the second and decisive round at Villeneuve-sur-Lot in the Lot-et-Garonne, south-west France, with 53.76% of the vote, the FN's candidate Etienne Bousquet-Cassagne attracted a sizeable 46.24% share of the electorate. “We have to draw the lessons from this vote, and from the first and second round [results],” said President François Hollande from Jordan where he was on an official visit.
The result of Sunday's much-scrutinised vote is perhaps complicated by the fact that this parliamentary seat was the one vacated by former budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac, who in April finally admitted that he had an undeclared Swiss bank account and decided to stand down as an MP. However, the FN nevertheless managed to come close to winning what would have been the far-right party's third parliamentary seat despite a concerted effort by other parties to defeat them.
The Socialist Party (PS), in particular, had called for supporters to “block” the FN by voting for the right-wing UMP candidate, after its own candidate lost in the first round – the party's eighth by-election defeat since Parliamentary elections a year ago. This was in the context of a so-called “front républicain” or republican front in which supporters of all mainstream parties are urged to vote tactically to stop the FN winning at the ballot box. Yet 23-year-old Bousquet-Cassagne still managed to pick up an extra 7,000 votes between the first round of voting at Villeneuve-sur-Lot – where he scored 26.11% - and the second round. If the FN's score at last year's parliamentary elections is taken into account it means the far-right party has gained 8,000 votes in the once socialist stronghold in just 12 months. The detailed results of the first and second round votes can be found here and here.
“Leap of twenty points by the FN in a week. The PS off the radar screen. Alert!!!” political commentator Gaël Brustier, author of 'Voyage au bout de la droite' ('Journey to the far-end of the Right' published in 2011 by Mille et une nuits) and a former adviser to government minister Arnaud Montebourg, wrote on Twitter after the result was announced.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The strong showing of the FN should come as little surprise, however. In March it came close to pulling off a by-election victory in the Oise département – roughly equivalent to a county – north of Paris when it and the UMP were once again in a head-to-head contest in the second round of voting. The UMP won by just 800 votes. As in Villeneuve-sur-Lot, the PS vote had collapsed in the first round, with many of their supporters switching their allegiance to the UMP but others, too, casting a vote for the far-right candidate.
The FN were quick to hail Sunday's narrow defeat in south-west France as an “ideological” and “political” victory. Its campaign director Michel Guiniot said the result confirmed the rapid growth in their electoral support and “shows that we are heading towards power”. Defeated candidate Bousquet-Cassagne claimed: “The electorate is ready to change, at [next year's] local elections we will win control of towns.” The party's president Marine Le Pen issued a statement in which she hailed its “spectacular progress”, claiming that what she calls the “UMPS” - the FN claims that the UMP and PS follow broadly the same policies – is no longer able to stop them from picking up votes at elections. “Years ago, when the FN managed to qualify for the second round of an election, its vote stalled...now it doubles its vote and picks up more than 20 percentage points between the two rounds,” she said.
The PS official in charge of elections Christophe Borgel tried to downplay the FN's gains between the first and second rounds in Villeneuve-sur-Lot. “The FN has a reserve of voters that corresponds to the number of people who voted for Marine Le Pen in the [2012] presidential election, and those voters turned out,” he said. Not all socialists agree with that analysis. “Need to try and understand how the FN could gain 7,000 votes between two rounds. It cannot all be blamed on Cahuzac,” tweeted Rémi Branco, who is deputy chief of staff to agriculture minister Stéphane Le Foll and politically close to President Hollande.
Last week François Hollande had himself viewed the PS's dismal performance in the first round of the Villeneuve-sur-Lot vote as simply part of the backlash over the Cahuzac affair. But after Sunday's result a number of figures on the Left, still shocked by the PS's poor showing, have called for an outright change in government policy. The defeated 2007 presidential candidate and president of the Poitou-Charentes region in west France Ségolène Royal urged “profound analysis” and concerted political action. The left-leaning movement La gauche populaire is meanwhile calling for an “updating of the PS's [political] software...to avoid us sinking, in our turn, into the wave of popularism that is sweeping through European countries”.
Socialist MP Christian Paul, who is close to former party boss Martine Aubry, took up a similar theme. “When the actions of the Left are hard to tell apart from the policies of the Right, the FN shakes the bulwarks of republicanism. Unfair but true,” he said. On Sunday it was the turn of the minister for industrial recovery Arnaud Montebourg to take up the cudgels against the austerity programmes being demanded by the European Commission, blaming them for provoking popularism and accusing Commission president José-Manuel Barroso of being “fuel for the Front national”.
The failure of the 'republican front'
Officially the PS tried to put a brave face on Sunday's result, pointing to the failure of the FN to win the seat. “This result was made possible by the spirit of responsibility and the republican leanings of citizens and organisations on the Left that enabled this barrier [against the FN],” said a party statement. Many, though, considered this a very optimistic reading of the outcome. In March in the Oise by-election the party had similarly called for its supporters to vote tactically against the FN, calling on them to back the right-wing UMP candidate instead. But there, as in Villeneuve-sur-Lot on Sunday, the FN only just failed to win. The key point is that despite an “unambiguous” call by the local PS leadership in Villeneuve-sur-Lot to keep the FN out, the far-right party still gained thousands of votes.
Clearly many voters on the Left either stayed away or spoiled their ballot papers and refused to take part in tactical voting against the FN. “People on the Left didn't really want to vote for [UMP candidate Jean-Louis] Costes,” admitted Matthias Fekl, a socialist MP for the Lot-et-Garonne département and first secretary of the departmental section of the PS, who had himself strongly supported the anti-FN blocking tactic. For many on the Left locally the UMP member was an unattractive candidate; underneath his civilised exterior, Costes is close to a very right-wing movement, the Mouvement initiative et libertés (MIL), in essence a pacific successor to the Service d'Action Civique (SAC) militia that was banned in 1982.
“The barriers have fallen between the FN and a UMP of which a section is following the line of [Patrick] Buisson [editor's note, the adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy whose election strategy of moving the campaign to the right was blamed by many for Sarkozy's defeat in the 2012 presidential election],” says Matthias Fekl. “There's a neo-nationalist bloc building around the UMP that voters on the Left will not vote for, and faced with that we now have to construct a new progressive alliance.” It is a diagnosis shared by Montebourg, who told France Inter radio: “Voters on the Left can in fact see that with a UMP that's getting closer to the FN, it's exactly the same thing as the Front national.”
Indeed, on Sunday night a lively debate began on Twitter between senior socialist figures over the value and future of the 'republican front' and the automatic assumption that left-wing voters should always vote for a UMP candidate in two-way contests with the FN.
“Sad evening following on from a first round whose seriousness must not be dodged. As for the automatic recourse to the republican front...that's enough!!!” tweeted MP Razzy Hammadi, who is close to the left-wing minister Benoît Hamon. This was immediately criticised by Christophe Borgel who wrote sarcastically: “You're right, next time we'll let the FN in! In short, I'm for continuing to block...” Another critic was Mehdi Ouraoui, chief of staff to PS first secretary Harlem Désir. “That's just like Copé [editor's note, a reference to UMP president Jean-François Copé who says he does not believe in the concept of a 'republican front']. And what's the alternative? You have to be a republican for all and maintain the barricades,” he wrote.
But socialist MP Alexis Bachelay insisted: “The republican front is dead, let's acknowledge that!” And the socialist MP and founder of the Gauche forte or 'strong Left' club within the party Yann Galut said: “As long as the UMP runs after the FN, voters will drag their feet in the face of calls from party leaders to form a republican front when voting.” He attacked the “extremist drift of a growing section of the UMP” towards the line advocated by Patrick Buisson, and called for the PS not to ask supporters to vote for the UMP against the FN “when the UMP candidates themselves adopt the ideas that we are fighting against”.
Another socialist MP Olivier Véran suggested: “The republican front works, its fragility is worrying. Let's fight the FN every day, let's expose its populist, hateful and toxic programme!” And Rémi Branco wrote: “Just because the meaning of 'republican front' has been blurred by the stance of some in the UMP we must not reject it. On the contrary.”
Will the PS change its policy on the 'republican front'? The matter is likely to be discussed at a PS national committee meeting this week and is set to be debated by members for some months to come. It is certainly becoming a pressing issue for the party. A period of sporadic by-elections, in which many voters abstain, is now over and attention is turning instead to the local elections scheduled for 2014. These promise to be a high-risk affair for the PS, which is already worried about a re-run of 1995 when, for the first time, the FN took overall control of three towns, Toulon, Orange and Marignane, all in the south of France. In subsequent local polls the far-right party has fared badly; in 2001 it was hit by an internal split and in 2008 the policies of President Sarkozy siphoned off support for the far-right.
Next year, with the FN resurgent once more, the PS is likely to be faced with the headache of second round votes in some towns where there are three rather than two candidates remaining: the PS, UMP and the FN. This is what happened in 1995 in Toulon, Orange and Marignane, with the PS and UMP split in the vote allowing the FN to win. Should the PS follow the republican front doctrine and consider withdrawing its candidate from a three-way race, even though there is a possibility that in some areas local UMP officials might forge alliances with the FN?
Earlier this month Harlem Désir's special adviser Alain Fontanel told Mediapart that the party had to “deal with the local elections early on, to ensure we have a clear strategy in four départements: the Gard, Bouches-du-Rhône, Var and Vaucluse”, which are all in the south of France. Those comments came as the party was trying to unravel the confusion surrounding the parliamentary election at Carpentras in the Vaucluse in June 2012 which Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, Marine Le Pen's niece, won. The PS candidate had made it through to the second round in a three-way contest with the UMP and FN, and opted to continue, despite trailing behind the two other candidates; the resulting split vote between the UMP and the PS allowed the FN's Maréchal-Le Pen to win. Quite why the PS candidate chose to fight on remains a bitterly controversial issue locally.
Today, the changing attitude of the Right could in fact help the PS to update its approach to electoral deals and pacts. The main opposition party the UMP, afraid of reinforcing the FN's claim that the PS and UMP or 'UMPS' are similar, is finding it harder and harder to support the republican front approach. Former prime minister and current UMP mayor of Bordeaux Alain Juppé said on BFMTV: “I'm not sure that to make a 'republican front' a national strategy is a good idea, I even wonder if, in some way, it doesn't feed the Front national propaganda that tries to bracket the UMP and the PS together – the 'they're all rotten' approach in order to distinguish themselves.” Former minister and current UMP MP Valérie Pécresse tweeted on Sunday: “This evening the socialists' 'Republican Front' ended.” UMP meanwhile reiterated that as far as he was concerned the “idea of a republican front” had no basis in reality.
UMP and FN vie to be official main opposition party
During last year’s presidential election Marine Le Pen won back voters who had opted for Nicolas Sarkozy in his successful campaign in 2007. The two recent by-elections in the Oise and Lot-et-Garonne show that from now on the FN and UMP are neck-and-neck in the fight to be France's official main opposition party.
For the first time UMP president Copé has made this clear. The “large vote” for the FN is a “serious warning” he said on Sunday evening. His sole aim was to make sure those missing votes were brought back into the fold of the right-wing UMP. “The electors need to know that if they want to punish the Left then they should move to the UMP,” he said, going on to highlight what he said were seven clear differences between his party and that of the far-right FN. “The UMP is a party of government dedicated to action in the service of the French people. The Front national is not a party of government,” Copé said. Instead it was “a party which is there first of all to symbolise the fears, the anger, the discontent, never to put forward lasting and credible solutions”. The FN was inspired, he said, by “the philosophy of rejection and of fear”.
While reiterating that he “rejected any electoral alliance with the Front national”, Copé depicted the “unshackled Right” that he intends to represent. This is a Right that is “proud of itself, which adopts authoritative positions, inflexible on questions of law and order, immigration and the rise of fundamentalism in all its forms”, and a Right that defends “a courageous stance on reforms” and a “position of social generosity but without being complacent about the dependency culture”. In essence, a Right that claims to fight against the Front national while talking just like it. It was a strategy that did not prove successful in the elections of 2012.
Copé's rival, François Fillon, also sees a “warning for the opposition” in the FN's strong showing but differs on the line to follow. The former prime minister says the UMP should be “faithful to its values” and bring together “the forces of the Right and of the centre” around a position based on reality.
Faced with a divided UMP, Marine Le Pen is now talking about a move towards taking power “doubtless faster that one could have imagined”. She continues to attack what she describes as the “UMPS” as a “political system that is starting to ship water on all sides”, and is scornful of the idea of a republican front which she says is the hallmark of “political connivance” of two identical parties trying to save their electoral interests “and the jobs that go with them”. It is a message that the French public is likely to hear much more of in the run-up to next year's local elections.
----------------------------------
English version by Michael Streeter