How French regional elections delivered a reverse political earthquake

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By Jonathan Frickert, a French lawyer and writer, often covering topics concerning decentralisation on his blog Élyséeologie

Zero, that’s the number of French regions that are about to be handed to Marine Le Pen’s “National Rally” (Rassemblement National, RN), following the election of regional presidents in a few days time.

That’s a failure for a party that is almost on a daily basis presented as being on the edge of power.

These elections were linked to departmental elections with a low turnout, and the second round confirmed the results of the first.

Struck by a massive abstention rate, the favorites for the 2022 presidential election appeared what they always had been: giants with feet of clay, unable to mobilize during local votes.

Le Pen’s RN stalls

Marine Le Pen really is the big loser of these elections. Her party, announced as being able to win in at least one region, failed to do so, including in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA), where former centre-right UMP minister Thierry Mariani managed to get a worse score than Marion Maréchal, the niece of Marine Le Pen, six years ago.

In addition to flattering polls, this second round could have given a real advantage to Marine’s team. But the poor results during the first round were due to a greater drop in turnout among the RN electorate than in the rest of the partisan spectrum and in particular in the Republican right.

The RN’s poor score also prevented the usual “Republican front” from forming, whereby some of the opponents of Le Pen do not put up a list.  In the 17 French regions, on average 3,5 lists were presented to voters yesterday, compared to only 2.8 six years ago.

This situation is illustrated by an analysis in HuffingtonPost.fr, which no longer even considered Marine Le Pen’s own stronghold, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, to be an election hot spot. Only the fate of the PACA region was a matter of suspense, with an advantage for its centre-right President Renaud Muselier, strengthened by the support of both Bernard Tapie and Nicolas Sarkozy, even if the latter had appointed Thierry Mariani as Minister of Transport during his presidency.

At the national level, the RN are enjoying the final stage of its de-demonization, which is now combined with a dangerously socialist discourse that would even make an “énarque” blush. However, this transformation of the RN into a socialist party has not helped its situation at the local level.

A lifeless Presidential Party   

Also the parties supporting President Macron have done poorly. In fact, they were handicapped by the bad performance of the RN, which sterilized the entire presidential strategy of trying to split the right through the pressure of a “Republican front”.

This situation was worsened as a result of the defection by MoDem, the main ally of Macron’s party La République En Marche! (LREM). Modem’s many elected officials preferred to play it safe by joining the centre-right Republicans (LR) during the first round in Île-de-France and Hauts-de-France.

The trip by President Macron and his wife to Le Touquet on Sunday to participate to the vote therefore delivered a particularly humiliating image to the President of the Republic. In the Hauts-de-France region, of which Le Touquet is part, LREM had endorsed LR’s Xavier Bertrand, the main opponent of Macron, apart from RN, and therefore likely to win against him. This illustrates well the state of La République en Marche on Sunday evening.

None of this did however prevent Macron’s ministers boasting of having obtained a victory, due to the lack of victory of the National Rally.

The Republicans (LR) keeps it up

With seven regions retained, the Republican LR right emerged victorious from the election. During the first round, those that voted for François Fillon in 2017 were the only electorate of which most turned up. This is hardly surprising, given how this electorate is now reduced to senior citizens, known to be less abstentionist than the rest of the population.

Laurent Wauquiez comes back out of the woodwork

There were three Presidential candidates among the seven regional outgoing presidents: Bertrand, Pécresse and Wauquiez. Wauquiez, the former president of the LR, who has been in the political wilderness since his party’s deplorable score in the 2019 European elections, came out of this election with the best score of the three presidential candidates mentioned, securing 56% of the vote in his Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, where RN performed even more poorly than in Paris. A focus on the national scene was strongly present in the victory speeches of these candidates, as the discourse of their speeches was more presidential than anything else.

A resilient left, despite fractures

For its part, the left achieved similar success, retaining the five regions it held. However, in Île-de-France, for the first time in its history, it faced a new type of Republican front. The campaign between the two rounds was marked by the unexpected support of socialists Manuel Valls and Jean-Paul Huchon for the right-wing candidate. Huchon, the former president of the region, made a different choice than the likes of Lionel Jospin and François Hollande, who endorsed Julien Bayou, head of the list of the “Union of the Left” in the region and National Secretary of Europe Ecology – The Greens.

This division of the left demonstrates well the split between the faction supporting French “republican” values and a faction more and more hostile towards the West and its values.

A record low turnout

The results of the second round were not so obvious. The high abstention rate in the first round made the second round dependent on remobilizing the voters of the various parties that tend to turn up, instead on the usual political theater to deal with various real or feigned threats.

Therefore, the high abstention rate made any prediction tricky.

On Sunday evening, the record low turnout was not much better than in the first round, since it barely reached 35% at the national level, which is an increase of less than two percentage points since the first round.

In comparison, during the last three regional elections, turnout increased by an average of 6 percentage points between the first and second rounds and with a peak of 8 percentage points in 2015 in a context of the threat FN posed to the traditional parties.

Two parallel political universes

These elections truly show that there are two levels of political life today.

On the one hand, there’s the national political life, with a cleavage between LREM and RN, two parties with a strong profile that are however incapable of the slightest local anchoring to support their partisan operations as well as incapable of convincing the local forces of the traditional right.

On the other hand, there’s local political life, where traditional parties are regaining their place, as they however continue to lack any national figure.

Compulsory voting?

Since the first round, some have proposed a solution for this democratic evil: compulsory voting. In reality, this would come down to genuine democratic rape, in order to compensate for the lack of enthusiasm for elections. In particular Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who introduced it in his 2017 presidential program, is pushing for this.

After having killed the consent for taxation, would the political class be tempted to kill democratic consent? This despite the fact that it is really is more urgent than ever to reinvigorate this kind of consent, after a five-year period marked by turbulence and authoritarianism.

Originally published in French by Contrepoints.fr

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