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Subject: [SPAM] The French Elections - What Happened? - The View from France
The French Elections - What Happened? - The View from France
The 6 Lessons of the 6th of May
Rejection of Sarkozysm, failure of the swerve to the
right by the UMP [1], its sanction by voters of all
social categories, the mobilization of the "people
of the left", the strength of the urban vote, and a
little story from Marseille: what we learn from the
second round of the presidential election.
by Christophe Deroubaix
Translated by Henry Crapo and reviewed by Bill Scoble
l'Humanite in English
May 10, 2012
http://www.humaniteinenglish.com/spip.php?article2034
1. The Referendum on Sarkozysm.
As usual, the second round saw an increase in participation, accompanied
this time by ... a decrease in valid votes for
candidates: 500,000 more voters, but a million fewer votes
to be counted, since there was a record number of votes nul
or blanc [2], more than 2 million of these.
With 18 million votes, François Hollande won 2.3 million
votes over and above the total for the set of candidates on
the left in the first round. Nicolas Sarkozy gained a paltry 50,000 votes
over the total of votes for the right and extreme right on 22 April. It is
clear that the flux is, as we see it, more complex than this reasoning with
a big marker and big blocks of votes. Note that the out-going president, now
gone, lost 2 million votes with respect to the 2007 election.
This had already been written and predicted. Reality has confirmed it. This
presidential election really became a game of "make or break" against
Nicolas Sarkozy and his politics. The personality of the outgoing president
surely played a role in the rejection of which he is the target, but certain
commentators have the tendency to blame the defeat to a sort of
incompatibility of mood between the French people and the person who was
supposed to preside over their destiny these past five years. On Sunday the
electors judged both the politics and the character, the latter seeming to
incarnate, in flesh and blood, the former. The soirée at Fouquet's [3]
acquired its full meaning only with the adoption of the fiscal shield [4]
... Half (between 48% and 55% according to the polling institutions) of
those voting for François Hollande had thus as primary motivation a vote
"against" Nicolas Sarkozy.
If further proof is needed that the rejection is not a
question of the personal agitations by the former minister
of the interior, you can find them in Meaux, the city of
Jean- François Copé, "won" by Hollande (54%, compared with 52.5% for
Sarkozy in 2007).
2. The Double Sanction of the Right in the Vote FN.
We already noted, right after the first round, how the vote
in favor of Marine Le Pen was made up, for the most part, of voters
sanctioning the right, half of the voters of the Front national wishing to
express their opposition to the head of state. That first punishment was
repeated on Sunday, because the transfer of votes from the far right toward
the right were insufficient to permit the right to win the election; only
half of the supporters of Marine Le Pen slipped a vote for Sarkozy into the
ballot box (compared with 70% in 2007, after the "siphoning" of the first
round), while a third of these voters preferred to abstain or vote blanc,
and about one-sixth of them turned to the Socialist party candidate.
It is common to speak of those "disillusioned by Sarkozysm".
In a study "The Point of Rupture. Study of the Sources of
Votes for the Front national in Popular Milieux" produced by the Fondation
Jean-Jaurès, Alain Mergier and Jérôme Fourquet insist on the sentiment of
"treachery" felt, and the concomitant receptivity to the discourse of Marine
Le Pen.
The maps of votes for Sarkozy and Le Pen in the first round coincide,
attesting to the existence of channels of communication. The swerve to the
far right by the out-going president amplified the "legitimacy" of the
competition entered into by these two political formations, in a context of
fusion of ideological bases. Nicolas Sarkozy broke the dikes, even around
the basic electors of the right, who now find themselves drowning in
extremist theses. Thus, henceforth, these two electoral groups (from 54% to
70% of the UMP, according to the polling institutes, and from 68% to 77% of
the Front national) manifest, in unison, their desire to see the two
formations reach agreement for a concrete electoral collaboration. If such a
collaboration be achieved, the alliance will be based on a real social and
ideological foundation ...
3. The "People of the Left" Made Possible the Victory of Hollande.
The exit polls leave no doubt: the electors on the left were mobilized on
the 6th of May, and few were lacking in support for the sole candidate who
would permit, on the second round, to chase Sarkozy from power. From 70% to
80% of those voting for Jean-Luc Mélenchon put a ballot in the urn for
Hollande, meaning, if we rely on measures obtained by two polling
institutes, 2.8 to 3.2 million votes. When we recall that the difference
between the two finalists was a bit more than a million votes, it remains to
conclude that the leaders of the Front de gauche and the candidate himself
were right no to finesse, beginning with the evening of the first round. The
higher the Front de gauche was placed by voters on 22 April, the higher the
left advanced in the second round: 65% in Vierzon, 67% in Port-au-Bouc, 72%
in Bagnolet, 74% in Ivry-sur-Seine, 76% in Gennevilliers, 78% in Saint-Denis
...
François Hollande's team, which expected an influx of voters from the
Bayrou [5] camp, uninhibited by the choice of their candidate, must today
observe that only a quarter of them voted for Hollande. About 40% chose
Nicolas Sarkozy and 30% made no choice at all (abstention, blank, or null).
The score of François Hollande, which appears more
complicated than would have been supposed, given the polls
of the previous week, is explained by the strong
mobilization, notably at the last minute, in an anti-left
movement: half of the voters of Nicolas Sarkozy wanted above all to avoid
the election of the Socialist Party candidate, putting aside any desire to
keep their champion in the Elysée Palace. One can imagine that the use, ad
nauseum, of the proposition by the candidate of the left, to accord the
right to vote in local elections to foreigners resident in France, must have
worked to some degree.
4. Hollande, the President Hoped For by All The French ... Except the
Seniors and Artisans.
In 2007, the massive vote of older citizens (63%) opened the doors of the
Elysée to Nicolas Sarkozy, who was lagging behind Ségolène Royal in all
the other age brackets, and in all the categories of social position. The
candidate of the UMP had clearly made progress in the popular and
intermediate milieux... This year, the "senior" vote (about
60%) avoided what would have been the most stinging defeat
for an out-going president in the history of the 5th
Republic. Of course the section of voters of "more than 60 years of age"
does not constitute a sociological category in and of itself, but we can
well observe that it represents an electoral category with significant
differences. Only the artisans and small-businessmen joined the seniors in
their untiring support for Nicolas Sarkozy.
For the rest, François Hollande has a majority everywhere.
He won the support of workers (58%), of wage-earners (57%),
of the intermediate professions (61%), of those who earn
less than 1200_ (59%) and even of managers and liberal professions (51%). It
is not a question of minimizing the attraction of the Front national for a
subset of the popular milieux, but the analysis of these figures does permit
us to deny any massive shift of these populations to the "dark side", that
lazy analysis of which one can guess the motivation. 66% of those voting
"Non" on the Treaty for the European Constitution in 2005 voted for
Hollande.
5. The Large Cities, Strategic Bases for the Left.
Such a domination of one "camp" in urban region is a
phenomenon unique in the history of French politics, at
least in recent times. A high level of vote for Hollande and
a penetration by a vote for Mélenchon, in the large cities, was already
evident in the first round. The second round places the left at an
historically high level. François Hollande obtained 54% in cities of 20,000
to 100,000 inhabitants and 57% in communities of more than 100,000
inhabitants. If one concentrates further on the top 30 most populated cities
in France (8.5 million people in all), what do we find? Nicolas Sarkozy had
a majority in only three of these, all in the Province-Alpes-Côtes-d'Azur
region: the fifth largest, Nice (60%), the 15th, Toulon (58%), the 22nd,
Aix-en-Province (53%). In the 27 cities having chosen the left, it is the
margin of victory by François Hollande that is striking: 19 of these cities
gave him more than 55% of the votes, of which 11 (Toulouse, Nantes,
Montpellier, Lille, Rennes, Grenoble, Saint-Denis de la Réunion, Le Mans,
Brest, Limoges and Clermont-Ferrand) gave him more than 60% .. Need we
recall that in the course of history the cities have always been the hearth
of invention of the future?
6. What Will Tomorrow Bring? The Laboratory of Marseille.
Clearly, the simple observation made above of the massive
vote of cities for the left will not fail to find its
utility in order to re-launch the burlesque-theatrical
debate using the term "bobo-populo". The left has nothing to gain from this
binary association that not only the FN and the UMP, but even some of its
own thinkers and representatives, try to impose on it. We must, first of
all, put an end to this intimidation via the term "bobo", a category
displaced from its original definition. One finds that the inventor of the
term was a right-wing commentator at the New York Times, David Brooks. Early
in the decade, beginning in the year 2000, he wished to portray the
emergence, according to him, of a new upper class. Bohemian, because they
adopted the heritage of the 1960's. Bourgeois, by their revenues, their way
of life and their embrace of Reagan economics. Today, by malicious
extension, "bobo" has come to mean any wage-earner with modest means who
chooses to live down-town and vote on the left.
Why, and how, should one reply to the challenge of a report
by a left-wing think tank to choose between one or the
other? Place this theoretical challenge for the left in a practical theater:
Marseille. A rapid scan of the results leads us to observe, simply, that the
left comes in ahead in the second round of a presidential election for the
first time since 1981, but with a small lead (50.87%). At the same time, a
casual glance at the electoral map leads us to the conclusion that the split
between north and south remains more present than ever (this is, by the way,
a reality). On the whole, not much new under the Mediterranean sun.
But much deeper changes are at work. The 1st arrondissement, around the
Canebière, is now the most firmly anchored to the left of the entire city
(68% in the first round, 72% for Hollande in the second round). Just next
door, the 5th arrondissement, in the heart of the circumscription of the UMP
Renaud Muselier, tipped to the left, 55% for Hollande as compared with
52.25% for Sarkozy in 2007. In these two cases, a new population of young
salaried workers settled in (those of age 18-39 represent between 37 and 39%
of the population, compared with 28% for the rest of the city). In these two
cases, the Front de gauche made a spectacular penetration (21.9% and 16.5%),
while the Socialist Party reproduced its results for 2007. The same
scenario, stability for the PS, remarkable penetration by the Front de
gauche, was repeated in the northern district, in the suburbs (the most
impoverished of France), within the territory of the city. Antoine, officer
in a downtown publicity company, and Nassera, part-time worker in business
and mother of family living in a poor public housing development - these are
the two archetypes of voters of the Front de gauche in Marseille.
Down-town, "suburb", but not just that. Marseille offers a whole "panoply".
The "residential" type of the "fine neighborhoods" who maintained their
support for Nicolas Sarkozy (62% in the 8th arrondissement the fief of the
deputy/mayor Gaudin. The "peri-urban" type with its residences that pop up
like mushrooms on the green fringe to the north-east and east of the city,
housing couples, both partners earning wages, intermediate professions and
managers for the most part, less inclined to vote on the right than in the
"real" peri-urban districts. A form of "rurality", to wind up the
enumeration, with its celebrated village hubs (former villages on the
periphery of Marseille, swallowed up by the industrialization and
urbanization at the end of the 19th century), which survive almost as
enclaves in the city, veritable nests for votes for the FN. In brief, all
the actors of French society find their place in this last great popular
city in France, of which the sociologist André Donzel never ceases to
remind us, that in its 2600 years, it has above all "a sense of the city"
(the "polis", in Greek). A lovely program for France!
[1] Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, the outgoing
president's party
[2] invalid, or blank
[3] the rich restaurant, filled with his rich associates, in which Sarkozy
celebrated his victory in 2007.
[4] which capped total taxation at 50%
[5] "centrist"
==========
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