France's ruling Socialist Party (PS) suffered a resounding defeat in Sunday's départemental or county elections. According to the official results the socialists and their allies lost control of 25 département councils they currently control. This means the PS will remain in control of just 34 of the councils, with the UMP-UDI right-centre alliance now in charge of between 66 councils. It represents a crushing victory for the Right and centre.
The far-right Front National, which had hoped to seize control of one or even two councils for the first time in its history, failed to do so, though it has seen a significant number of councillors elected for the first time, confirming that its local presence is growing in French politics..
Speaking minutes after voting closed, prime minister Manuel Valls conceded that the Left had “undeniably” been beaten. “The Republican right has won the départemental elections,” he said, before going on to describe the progress of Marine Le Pen's far-right party as a “defeat for all Republicans”. He pledged the government would continue to make employment its key issue and said they would shortly propose measures to favour “private and public investment” and encourage job creation “particularly in small and medium-sized businesses”. Valls, who had already made clear that he would be staying on as head of the government under President François Hollande whatever the outcome, insisted that the political direction of his government would not change.
Shortly afterwards ex-head of state and new president of the UMP Nicolas Sarkozy claimed victory for the alliance of the “Republican Right”, as he called it, saying that never since the history of the Fifth Republic, created at the end of the 1950s, had the Right and centre held control of so many départements. And in a blunt message he made it clear he regarded the election outcome as having national as well as local significance. “The French people have massively rejected the policies of François Hollande and his government,” said Sarkozy, accusing the administration of “lies, denial and impotence”.
Despite its failure to win control of a council, Marine Le Pen's party did pick up a number of councillors, and she claimed that support for their candidates had “clearly grown” since last week's first round of voting. “There is not doubt about the verdict from the voting booths - the Socialist Party has been annihilated, disappearing from the map in many départements,” she said.
Among the departéments lost by the Left is the Corrèze in central France. This was a major symbolic victory for the Right, as from 2008 to 2012 François Hollande was president of the Corrèze council, and the area and its capital Tulle are still seen as the president’s political stronghold. Another setback for the socialists was the loss of the Côtes-d'Armor département in Brittany in west France which has been in their hands since 1976. Claiming victory, the head of the UMP opposition on the council, Alain Cadec, described it as a “very major victory”.
Yet another symbolic victory for the Right came in the Essonne, south of Paris, where Manuel Valls was mayor of the départmental capital Évry from 2001 to 2012, and where the prime minister was elected as an MP in 2012.
The départements that have been won by the Right include: the Ain, Allier, Bouches-du-Rhône, Charente, Cher, Corrèze, Côtes-d'Armor, Creuse, Deux-Sèvres, Doubs, Drome, Essonne, Eure, Isère, Jura, Nord, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Saône-et-Loire, Seine-Maritime, Seine-et-Marne, Tarn and the Territoire de Belfort. The French Communist Party also had a bad night, losing control of one of the two remaining councils where it still governed, Allier in central France, though it held on to the Val-de Marne south-east of Paris. However, in their sole success of the night, the socialists did manage to capture control of the Lozère in central south-east France from the Right.
In the first sign of the discontent that the election drubbing is likely to provoke on the left of the Socialist Party, a group of socialist parliamentary rebels issued a statement calling for a “unity contract” binding the whole of the Left for the next 12 months. This would entail “new policies” from the government after this “new defeat”, said the rebels. For his part, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, founder of the radical left Parti de gauche, and a frequent critic of the government, claimed that “our country faces the threat of falling apart”. He launched an appeal to avoid “Hollande and Valls reducing the fine progressive idea of the Left to nothingness”. Emmanuelle Cosse, national secretary of the green party, the EELV – some of whose members may be invited back into the government if there is a reshuffle - said: “The government must fully commit itself to a new direction.” And the national secretary of the communist party (PCF), Pierre Laurent, highlighted what he called the “major responsibility” of President Hollande and prime minister Valls for the Right's return to power locally.
However, senior figures in the PS sought to play down the scale of the Left's losses. Bruno Le Roux, president of the socialist group of MPs at the National Assembly, said it was a “serious failure” but not an “historic” one. He explained: “It's a failure as we are going to fall, [but] not to our lowest level, that's why I would not say 'historic failure'.” And the PS first secretary Jean-Christophe Cambadélis said there had been a “decline in the PS's presence without, however, there being a débâcle”. He said, though, that a “union” of the Left had to be put in place for regional elections that take place in December of this year. Cambadélis is due to have a meeting with representatives from the EELV on Monday, March 30th, to discuss such a union.
There was anger in the ranks of some of the beaten socialist candidates. Jérome Guedj, the defeated president of the council at Essonne, south of Paris, said: “We have been carried away by a wave for which we were not responsible. This evening is the dress rehearsal of what will happen to us in 2017 [editor’s note, year of the next presidential election] if we don’t change anything.” There was dismay, too, on the Left at Manuel Vall's post-election comments in which he made clear that the government’s line was not going to change. “When you've summoned up the entire electorate you don't want to say 'we're not changing anything',” said veteran left-wing socialist MP Henri Emmanuelli. “It's obvious that you have to draw some lessons, take some consequences.”
Yet another highly-symbolic win for the Right was that of the Nord département in the north of the country, a stronghold of former PS first secretary Martine Aubry, who is mayor of the major city of Lille. She described the outcome of Sunday's elections as a “protest vote”. She backed the idea of a union of the Left but said there needed to be a genuine agreement underpinning the unity. “You can't reunite if there is no agreement on the fundamentals,” Aubry said.
On the Right there was jubilation, with the UMP mayor of Bordeaux, Alain Juppé, saluting the “victory for the strategy of the UMP-UDI-MoDem alliance”. The UMP's vice-president and former minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet tweeted: “Some great wins for our candidates everywhere in France. The French people have given us their trust. We will be worthy of it!” But at the centrist MoDem party there was a hint of caution from leader François Bayrou. He said Sunday's results were a “brutal” and “extremely strong” punishment inflicted by the electorate on the government and the PS, but said the outcome was “not yet” a vote of outright support for the opposition.
The ministry of the interior announced that across France 1,714 UMP and UDI candidates had been elected, 380 others on various right-wing tickets, 98 candidates from the UDI-MoDem alliance, 1,168 PS candidates had been voted in, 228 standing under other left-wing labels allied to the PS, 26 communists, 54 FN candidates and 76 from the radical-left Front de gauche, plus 2 from the green EELV.
The figures show that almost exactly half of those entitled to vote - 49.99% - went to the voting booths on Sunday. Voter turnout across the country as of 5pm had been reported by the ministry of the interior to be 41.94%, well up on the 36.20% figure for the second round of the corresponding election in 2011. But it was slightly down on the 5pm figure in last week's vote, 42.98%. The turnout at midday had been 15.83%. This was above the figure for the second round of the 2011 election, but down on the 18.02% reported at the same time in last Sunday’s first round of voting.
In that first round vote the Socialist Party (PS) scored just 21.78% of the vote, while the far-right Front National picked up 25.24%. The alliance between the right-wing UMP, led by Nicolas Sarkozy, and the centrist UDI came top of the poll with 29.39% of the vote. However this Sunday's vote was all about how the vote translated into the number of council seats won, which in turn determines who runs France's 100 département or county councils.