The second and final round of partial regional elections across France on March 27th saw a clear victory for the parties of the left, which are now set to control 64 of the country's 100 départements, the administrative regions broadly equivalent to a county. Stéphane Alliès and Lénaïg Bredoux report.
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The abstention rate in the second round was a massive 55.3%, and which reached 55.6% in the first round one week earlier, together the highest recorded in these elections called to choose councilors for the assemblies that administer France's départements.
This and the surge in support for the far-right Front National (FN) has shaken the mainstream left and right. While the FN claimed 11.7% of all votes cast, it reached 40% of votes in many of those constituencies where it was represented in the second round play-off.
Each département is divided up into electoral constituencies called cantons, and which total 4,039 nationwide, including those of four French overseas regions. One councilor from each canton sits on the assemblies that govern the départements.
Just more than half - 2,026 cantons - were involved in the elections this month, when 21 million people were called to the runs, and which were roughly equivalent to county council elections.
The broad left, (including the Socialist Party, the Green alliance Europe Ecologie-Les Verts, the Front de Gauche radical left alliance), scored 49.9%, ahead of the ruling conservative right UMP and its allies with 35.87%, and the FN with 11.7%. The left has won the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, and Jura départements and is likely to gain control, through alliances for the election of council leaders, of four others; the Loire, the Savoie and two French Indian Ocean overseas départements, Mayotte and La Réunion.
The poll on Sunday was the last before presidential elections in 2012, and the results offered mixed warnings for both left and right mainstream parties.
President Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party was the one, single loser of the elections, and in terms of political figures it was the president himself, expected to run for a second term in office next year, who suffered the biggest setback. But his party, which scored just more than 20%, did win control of the Val-d'Oise département north of Paris. That was all the more precious because this is the former electoral base of International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, tipped to become the Socialist Party candidate in next year's presidential elections.
But the poor performance nationwide, and the rise of the far-right Front National, largely to the cost of the mainstream right, has opened up splits in the ruling conservative right camp. Dominique Paillé, a former UMP spokesman and rival of current UMP secretary general François Copé, on Sunday criticized the party for its recent attempts to appeal to the far-right electorate, describing it as both "a positioning error and a strategic error". This includes President Sarkozy's controversial drive for a debate on the place of Islamic practices in secular France.
French Prime Minister François Fillon appeared to take much the same line, declaring that the FN "must be fought and the reasons that it has an audience must be evaluated with lucidity and dealt with." Budget minister and government spokesman François Baroin on Monday called for the UMP to end its highlighting conflicts between France's secular institutions and the Islamic community, centred on religious dress and practices, and return to its "profoundly republican [democratic] values".
The FN won just two cantons of the 403 where it was present in the second round, and had hoped to take ten. These second-round results saw it pitted in separate duels against candidates from the mainstream left and right. Despite its failure in terms of the numbers of councilors elected, it gained 47% on the 620,000 votes it attracted in these constituencies during the first round one week earlier, reaching a total of 915,000 votes. Importantly, it reached 40% and more of votes cast in many cantons in its heartland of south-east France, including in the PS stronghold of Marseille.
While the Socialist Party (PS), the main opposition party, took a majority 36% slice of the vote (its allies another 13%), it had hoped to gain control of eight departments - two more than the six it is likely to win. A lot of concern was expressed at both the abstention rate and the surge of the far right. PS Member of Parliament Arnaud Montebourg, a leading party figure and a contender to become its presidential candidate, warned that the 55% abstention rate was "a serious message of disbelief in and disenchantment with the parties of government and those who aspire to it [to govern]."
But despite the disappointments, PS first secretary Martine Aubry was given a boost for her own ambitions to become the party's presidential candidate; an open letter published by Mediapart on Monday and signed by a group of 47 PS MPs called for her to be chosen in its primaries later this year. They described the PS score on Sunday as one that established it as the "major party" in France, giving Aubry the "legitimacy" to represent it in the presidential poll next spring, and illustrating her capacity to rally the broad left behind her. It was the first real opening shot in what is likely to be a hard-fought battle for the internal election of the party's candidate, to be decided by October.
Meanwhile, the Green alliance, Europe Ecologie-Les Verts, won 2.8% of the vote nationwide, gaining 32 cantons and bringing its total number of assembly councilors to 49. It was a success for the recently-formed alliance, despite lower than hoped-for scores in some regions, notably the north-west, and has established it as a significant minority force in local politics.
The radical left Front de Gauche alliance, set up in 2009, uniting the Communist Party (PC) and the Parti de Gauche (Party of the Left), the latter created in 2008 by a leftist breakaway movement from the Socialist Party, garnered 5% of the national vote. It saw 118 candidates elected, of which 113 were communists. Importantly, the PC, which has seen its popularity regularly shrink over the past decades, retained control of the Val-de-Marne département near Paris, and the Allier in central France.
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