Parliamentary Affairs Advance Access originally published online on November 22, 2005
Parliamentary Affairs 2006 59(1):118-137; doi:10.1093/pa/gsj013
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Political Representation in France: A Crisis of Democracy?
Senior Lecturer in French Studies, University of Warwick
The past two decades have witnessed growing political disaffection and a widening mass/elite disjuncture in France, reflected in opinion polls, rising abstentionism, electoral volatility and fragmentation, with sustained voting against incumbent governments. Though the electoral system has preserved the duopoly of the mainstream coalitions, they have suffered loss of public confidence and swings in electoral support. Stable parliamentary majorities conceal a political landscape of assorted anti-system parties and growing support for far right and far left. The picture is paradoxical: the French express alienation from political parties yet relate positively to their political institutions; they berate national politicians but retain strong bonds with those elected locally; they appear increasingly disengaged from politics yet forms of ‘direct democracy’ are finding new vigour. While the electoral, attitudinal and systemic factors reviewed here may not signal a crisis of democracy, they point to serious problems of political representation in contemporary France.
ON the morning of 21 April 2002, voting in the first round of the French presidential election got underway. The election marked the end of a 5-year period of ‘cohabitation’, or power-sharing, between the neo-Gaullist President Jacques Chirac and a ‘plural left’ government under Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. Despite a record slate of 16 candidates, all six main polling agencies had consistently predicted that, as in 1995, these two main contenders would face each other in the decisive round on 5 May. They were wrong.2 Winning 16.9% of the ballot, the support of 4.8 million voters, the leader of the Front National (FN), Jean-Marie Le Pen, edged Jospin out of the race to ensure that a far-right candidate would for the first time contest the run-off for France’s highest political office. The questions raised by this result about the state of representative democracy in France were made no less acute by the overwhelming margin of victory in the second round, where Chirac, backed by the ‘plural left’ as well as the centre-right, trounced Le Pen with 82.2% to 17.8%. That France should have voted massively, in the popular parlance, for a ‘crook’ in order to keep out a ‘fascist’ hardly reflected well on the French polity.
Yet Le Pen’s passage to the second round was only one symptom among several of the political malaise laid bare by the 2002 presidential election, and that election was but one in a series of polls which have been marked by varying degrees of volatility and signs of a widening gulf between electors and elites in France. The present article explores this political malaise, which found its most recent expression in the European Union (EU) constitutional treaty referendum of May 2005, and seeks to identify some of the reasons underlying it. It examines aspects of French public opinion in relation to the functioning of democracy and considers how disaffection with the mainstream parties has served as a stimulus to negative politicisation and modified the conditions of electoral competition in France.
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Volatile voters |
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 Top Volatile voters Disaffected votersElectoral fragmentationNegative politicisationA crisis of democracy?ConclusionsNotes |
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Electoral volatility in France does not date from 2002. Every legislative election in the past 25 years has seen the governing majority overturned. To judge by the swing in the last three of these elections, moreover, the momentum of rejection against incumbent governments has grown appreciably. The elections of 1986 and 1988 produced narrow majorities and largely preserved the right/left equilibrium that had hitherto characterised the French party system under the Fifth Republic, with four dominant parties facing off in opposing coalitions. The classic illustration of this ‘quadrille bipolaire’ had occurred in 1978, when the Socialist PS, the Communist PCF, the neo-Gaullist RPR, and smaller centre-right parties within and around the UDF,3 each recording a score of 20%–25%, had accounted for some 90% of the vote. Despite the emergence of the FN as an isolated force on the far right and the decline of the PCF, the power balance between the opposing blocs was broadly maintained in the 1980s, with an ascendant PS compensating for its weaker Communist partner within the left bloc and the RPR–UDF prompted into more disciplined alliance by the FN.
Since then, the electoral landscape has undergone a series of more dramatic shifts. Closing the second 5-year period of Socialist government under President François Mitterrand, the elections of 1993 saw the Socialist/Communist tandem and their smaller allies fall from almost 49% (in 1988) to just over 29%, with the PS alone collapsing from 34.9% to 17.8%, a loss of some 4 million votes.4 This was the worst first-round result for the left in legislative elections since the foundation of the Fifth Republic in 1958, giving the centre-right 485 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly. That sweeping victory was followed, after 4 years in government, by the weakest performance on record for the RPR–UDF alliance, which sustained a loss of 216 seats. Winning 190 of these, the PS returned to government in 1997 at the head of a coalition including Communists, Greens and others. In the subsequent legislative elections of 2002, the centre-right was returned with an emphatic majority once more. The novel aspect of these elections was the launch, in the wake of Chirac’s re-election as President, of a large centre-right party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), incorporating the RPR, much of the UDF and its offshoot Démocratie Libérale (DL). For only the third time under the Fifth Republic, a single party (the UMP, with 369 seats) secured an outright majority in the National Assembly. This compounded the humiliation for the Socialists of having seen their candidate ousted by Le Pen in the presidential election, and left the centre-right in control of the Elysée, National Assembly, Senate, Constitutional Council and most regional and departmental councils throughout France.
This brief overview of the fluctuating fortunes of the main parties of right and left in recent legislative elections forms part of a wider picture of electoral shifts and fragmentation. Though some of the same factors that dictated the bipolarisation of the 1960s and 1970s remain in place, others have been substantially transformed.5 Changes in social structures, the long-term decline of the PCF, the sustained challenge of the FN, the progressive rapprochement of centre-right and centre-left, and the growth in issue-specific voting have all conspired to disrupt the old right/left polarisation and redefine political alignments.
The apparent stability restored to French politics in 2002 by the hegemony of the UMP did not last long. The regional elections of March 2004 saw the left sweep all but two of metropolitan France’s 22 regional councils. This almost entire collapse of the centre-right replayed in reverse the rout of the left in 1992, when the RPR–UDF had won 20 of the 22 metropolitan regions. In three consecutive regional elections, the balance of power had swung from one extreme to the other, with a right/left split of 20/2 in 1992, 14/8 in 1998 and 2/20 in 2004. A more historic landmark was passed in the cantonal elections held at the same time to elect councillors to the 100 departmental councils in metropolitan and overseas France. The swing here saw the balance of power shift to the left for the first time since the creation of the departments in 1790, with 51 left-wing to 49 centre-right councils (compared with the previous ratio of 41/59).
Though subnational and supranational elections require cautious interpretation in relation to national voting trends, the European elections of June 2004 and the EU constitutional treaty referendum of May 2005 fitted this same shifting pattern. In the European elections, the PS won 31 of the 78 French seats in the European Parliament, against the governing UMP’s 17 and the UDF’s 11; in language that has become common currency for French political commentators, this was proclaimed a ‘crushing’ and ‘historic’ victory (Le Monde, 15.6.04). The subsequent decision by President Chirac to put the proposed EU constitution to referendum was prompted in part by a resolution of the UMP national council, but it was based above all on the calculation that the French would vote ‘yes’. Though the Maastricht referendum of 1992 had resulted in a narrow ‘yes’ vote (51%), there were no early signs that a referendum on the constitution would produce anything other than a clear majority in support. With polls as late as March 2005 predicting a 56%/44% vote in favour (Le Monde, 27.5.05), the eventual rejection of the constitution by a similarly wide margin (55%/45%) had its own perverse irony and raised a host of questions over both France and Europe.
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Disaffected voters |
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TopVolatile votersDisaffected votersElectoral fragmentationNegative politicisationA crisis of democracy?ConclusionsNotes |
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This sequence of votes against successive governments and their projects points to a disjuncture between electoral demand and political supply. Alternating right/left governments do not in themselves signify electoral instability, of course, and might be taken as evidence of a healthy pluralist democracy. Nor do such alternations necessarily signal an inordinate degree of volatility, since they can result as much from bloc demobilisation (voters simply not turning out) as from bloc switching (voters actively transferring their support). While there is evidence of both trends in recent French electoral behaviour,6 the sanction inflicted on incumbent governments over six elections—following six elections that had consistently returned centre-right majorities—appears not as a ‘normal’ electoral rhythm but, allied to other factors, as an exacerbated expression of political disaffection. Such disaffection has been long in the making. The past 60 years in France fall neatly into two periods: les trente glorieuses, defined by post-war recovery, growth and economic prosperity, even if they are lived more fondly in memory than they were by many in reality; and, since the first oil crisis of 1973, 30 less-than-glorious years marked by economic recession and restructuring, de-industrialisation, urban decay and social tensions generated largely by high unemployment, rising crime rates and the difficulties of integrating large immigrant communities.
The great ‘alternance’ of 1981, which saw the PS and its junior PCF partner elected to power for the first time under the Fifth Republic, was a defining moment. It redrew the parameters of the left/right debate and imposed a new, painful, realism about the incapacity of government to effect economic miracles. The Socialists came to office on unrestrained promises to deliver economic recovery, reduce unemployment (which had trebled to over 1.5 million between 1974 and 1981), and create a new inclusive society. The central axes of their economic programme were large-scale nationalisations coupled with a policy of redistributive Keynesianism to stimulate growth and reduce unemployment through heavy government spending. The failed ‘Socialist experiment’ gave way not to a new society but to a new politics of austerity that exceeded the deflationary policies of the late 1970s under Prime Minister Raymond Barre. In a climate of deepening recession, rising unemployment and inflation, and hard-hitting austerity measures, the growth in pessimism and political disenchantment was palpable.7
While distrust of politicians was not a sentiment new to the French, failing faith both in the prescriptions of government and in the political class as a whole was to become a leitmotif in opinion surveys, with governments enjoying little by way of ‘honeymoon’ periods once in office. Just as the Socialists and Communists had mortgaged themselves to unrealistic promises while in opposition in the 1970s, the centre-right parties would in turn repeat the error. Following Mitterrand’s 14 years in the Elysée, Chirac won the 1995 presidential election on extravagant promises to heal the ‘fracture sociale’ caused by unemployment (running then at over 3 million), poverty and exclusion. The image was evocative and the intention worthy, but the rhetoric was out of tune with the austerity policies pursued by his first Prime Minister, Alain Juppé. By December 1995, a wave of public-sector strikes already presaged the end of a deeply unpopular government that would be drummed out of office some 18 months later.
Though emphatic, the swing that saw Jospin’s Socialist-led coalition replace Juppé’s government in 1997 was explicable not as a vote in favour of the left but as a vote against the outgoing centre-right.8 It was largely due to rejection of Juppé’s benefit-cutting programme and to the strong performance of the FN, which won 15% of votes in the first round and split the right to damaging effect in the second. A SOFRES exit poll yielded telling insights into the public mood and confirmed the absence of any groundswell of genuine support for the left. In response to the question of whether right or left was better placed to combat unemployment, 37% of those polled said the right, 37% the left and 23% neither. On the more general question of which side was better equipped to govern the country, 31% said the right, 31% the left and fully 37% neither (Libération, 3.6.97).
Following Chirac’s re-election in 2002, the appointment as Prime Minister of the disarmingly provincial Jean-Pierre Raffarin was an attempt by the President to connect with grass-roots France. Chirac had ‘heard and understood’ the message of the people, and the ‘renewal of the Republican pact’ would be sealed with ‘a different kind of politics’ (Le Monde, 7.5.02). Once again rhetorical flourish exceeded the capacity of government to deliver. By the time of the 2004 regional and cantonal elections, Raffarin was vying in unpopularity with his predecessor Juppé, unemployment was resurgent at almost 10% (2.4 million), the budget deficit was incurring censure from Brussels and a succession of demonstrations by hospital workers, teachers, performing artists, pensioners, rail staff, postal workers, research scientists and others defied the government’s proposed reforms to unemployment benefit, the pensions system, health care and education.
The vote on the EU constitutional treaty in May 2005 was, in this context, less a referendum on Europe than a ‘raffarindum’ on an irredeemably unpopular Prime Minister and government. Polling by TNS-SOFRES showed fears over unemployment and ‘ras-le-bol’ (general disgruntlement) to be the two determining factors in the ‘no’ vote, with 92% of respondents judging the government to have failed in its essential mission to combat unemployment. Close to four out of five blue-collar workers voted ‘no’, followed by large majorities of white-collar workers, agricultural workers, public-sector workers and the unemployed; only business owners, managers and educated professionals exuded the confidence to vote mainly in support.9 In February 2005, a joint session of both houses of parliament held in Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles had approved by 730 to 66 votes the amendment to the Constitution of the Fifth Republic required to allow for ratification of the EU constitution. That a process approved by over 90% of the vote among parliamentary deputies and senators should be rejected by 55% of French citizens provided its own commentary on the current disjuncture between electors and elites in France.
The decline of public confidence in politicians to resolve France’s socioeconomic problems has been compounded not only by the perceived failures of alternating governments but by three periods of ‘cohabitation’ (for 9 of the past 20 years) which have magnified the impression that voters no longer exercise any meaningful choice at the ballot box. Confidence has been eroded, too, by a succession of high-profile corruption cases featuring politicians of right and left. These have involved misappropriation of public funds, illicit party financing, corrupt allocation of public works contracts, insider trading, tax fraud, housing scandals and a range of other transgressions uncovered by a new generation of zealous investigating magistrates. The trial and imprisonment of a number of former Socialist and centre-right ministers, and the suicide in 1993 of an outgoing Socialist Prime Minister (Pierre Bérégovoy) facing allegations of financial irregularity, merely amplified the general discredit. The conviction in January 2004 of another former Prime Minister (Juppé) for siphoning Paris municipal funds to finance the RPR during Chirac’s reign as mayor was symptomatic of a corruption so institutionalised as to have become almost unremarkable.10 Only a ruling by the Constitutional Council to protect presidential immunity prevented Chirac himself from being indicted in this and other investigations. ‘Liberté, Egalité, Impunité’ runs a popular parody of the Republican motto.
Political corruption in France is, of course, not new, nor is the anti-political animus to which it gives rise. The perceived corruption of national politicians under the Third Republic was not the least of the factors that helped Pierre Laval to apply the coup de grâce in July 1940 and usher in the castigating dictatorship of Marshal Pétain. There is a crucial comparison to be made here with contemporary French political attitudes. In 1940, ‘la gueuse’ (‘the old slut’), as the Third Republic was called by its opponents, had few supporters among the French at large, the political class or even the early Resistance. In France today, by contrast, the Fifth Republic benefits from a robust popular consensus, marking a sharp distinction between the public perception of France’s political institutions and that of its politicians. In polls conducted in 1991, the approval rating of 72% for the Constitution, 63% for the presidency and 60% for the institutions of the Fifth Republic sank to 25% for politicians and 18% for political parties. Measured more recently, in 2000, support for the institutions of the Fifth Republic stood at 71%, while a similar proportion of respondents deemed themselves poorly represented by political parties (70%) and political leaders (74%).11 The point was graphically demonstrated by a poll published in Le Monde shortly before the 2002 presidential election (17.4.02). Asked to identify the quality most required of a President of the Republic, 72% selected ‘honesty’; asked to state whether or not President Chirac possessed this quality, 8% replied in the affirmative. Another desideratum identified by a majority of respondents was that the President should be ‘in touch with people’s concerns’—a quality which only 16% found in Chirac (and 21% in Jospin).
Though corruption is not presented today, as it was by the anti-republicans of the inter-war years, as integral to the very institutions of parliamentary democracy, it has further sapped public confidence in those who occupy those institutions. A succession of polls through the 1990s confirmed the association of politics and corruption in the public perception. One such poll, in 1994, showed 71% of respondents believing corruption to be more rife among national politicians than in any other listed profession; a similar poll in 2000 raised the finding to 72%.12
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Electoral fragmentation |
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TopVolatile votersDisaffected votersElectoral fragmentationNegative politicisationA crisis of democracy?ConclusionsNotes |
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Growing disaffection with mainstream political parties has opened the way for a proliferation of alternative parties and pressure groups aggressively campaigning on specific themes. The FN has played a major part in destabilising the traditional voting pattern of the 1960s and 1970s, but so too have a variety of ecologists, hunting lobbyists, ‘sovereignists’, regionalists, dissident offshoots from the centre-right and centre-left, and radical parties at both ends of the spectrum. As already noted, the four main parties (PS, PCF, RPR and UDF) and their satellites polled some 90% of the votes in 1978; in the legislative elections of 1993, 1997 and 2002, they attracted under 70%. Where broadly ten parties or tendencies had contested the 1981 legislative elections, more than twice that number were represented in 2002, fielding a record 8,455 candidates in all—an average of almost 15 for each of the 577 seats.
It was this same fragmentation rather than any significant electoral advance by Le Pen that sealed Jospin’s defeat in the first round of the 2002 presidential election. Between 1995 and 2002, Le Pen increased his share of the poll from 15% to 16.9%, adding fewer than a quarter of a million votes; in the same elections, Jospin’s share dropped from 23.3% to 16.2%—a loss of more than 7% and almost 2.5 million votes. With a Communist, a Left Radical, a renegade Socialist, a Green and no fewer than three Trotskyist candidates contesting the ground around him, Jospin’s elimination was an accident waiting to happen. The most striking feature in the vote distribution on the left was the combined 10% won by the two main Trotskyist candidates, Arlette Laguiller and Olivier Besancenot, who tapped into resentment over the Socialists’ concessions to economic liberalism and perceived disregard for workers’ rights. With just under 3 million votes, they increased the far-left tally by some 1.4 million on Laguiller’s 1995 showing. Jospin’s unscheduled exit was provoked not by the far right but by the far left. Nor was he alone in being thus outflanked. The once dominant PCF recorded its worst performance ever, with its candidate paying a heavy price for participating in Jospin’s government. With 3.4%, Robert Hue failed even to qualify for reimbursement of his campaign costs.
Despite the unprecedented number of candidates, the perceived problem with the 2002 presidential election lay paradoxically in the lack of choice on offer. After 5 years of ‘cohabitation’, Chirac and Jospin struggled to persuade a disengaged public that the election of either might make a difference. Polls showed a majority of respondents to be disinterested in the election, with 82% believing that politicians were ‘not concerned with what people like us think’ (a figure that had risen inexorably from 42% in 1977 to 65% in 1990 and 72% in 1995).13 While little was found to distinguish the two main candidates on policy, Jospin failed to claim due credit for his achievements in government (most notably in bringing unemployment down from 12% to 9%). Neither socialist enough to satisfy the grass-roots left nor social–democratic enough to convince the centre, he fell in the end between the two. His dour, visionless campaign—announced by fax to the press—exuded all the technocratic suffisance of a remote political class. Jospin’s were the only campaign headquarters where a schedule of public meetings to be held between the two rounds was on display. Hubris with an unassuming face.
Once again Chirac’s campaign worked to Le Pen’s advantage. In 1995, Chirac had contrived the defining theme of the ‘fracture sociale’ only to be outdistanced by the FN leader among the most socially deprived sections of the electorate. Defining the campaign theme of 2002 as ‘l’insécurité’, or law and order, he gifted Le Pen the opportunity to play one of his strongest cards. With Jospin eliminated, the President became a spectator at his own re-election. As huge demonstrations took to the streets across France in protest against the FN leader, Chirac neither had to campaign nor even had to endure the traditional televised debate, from which he conveniently withdrew on moral grounds. Having attracted 19.9% of first-round votes cast by fewer than 14% of registered voters, he was returned to the Elysée with an exorbitant 62% of the electoral register. Since he achieved this by dint merely of not being Jean-Marie Le Pen, the victory was a hollow one, even if it allowed Chirac to pose as the embodiment of the Republic in danger. Over four presidential campaigns spanning 21 years, Chirac had managed first-round scores of 18%–20.8%. In the first direct election to the presidency in 1965, by contrast, the incumbent Charles de Gaulle came close to resigning when he polled a ‘mere’ 44.6% and faced a run-off with the left-alliance candidate, Mitterrand, instead of being elected by popular acclaim on the first ballot.14 It is the same presidency that Chirac occupies today, but the notion of presidential legitimacy has been downsized since the days of his imposing predecessor.
As a further measure of fragmentation in this landmark election, the combined 36% (under 25% of the electoral register) won by Chirac and Jospin in 2002 was the weakest performance by the two leading mainstream candidates in a presidential first ballot. It compared starkly with the 76% polled by the two mainstream contenders in 1965 and 1974 and fell short even of the 44% shared by the same Chirac and Jospin in 1995. The 10.3 million who voted for the President or Prime Minister in 2002 were outnumbered by the 11.7 million who abstained.
It is well attested that many would-be Jospin supporters viewed the first round as a formality and stayed at home. This raises another important feature of the 2002 election and more generally of the electoral fragmentation under discussion. Since the foundation of the Fifth Republic, the presidential election has been the defining event in the electoral cycle. No incoming President has failed to command a sympathetic majority in the National Assembly; together with the extensive powers of his office, this has confirmed the President as the prime mover within the French polity.15 Presidential elections have historically witnessed the highest voter turnout and tended to generate the greatest public interest. In 1995, the first-round abstention of 21.6% (8.6 million) was markedly higher than that of 1988 (18.6%, 7.1 million) and of 1981 (18.9%, 6.9 million), but still modest compared to the unprecedented 28.4% (11.7 million) who abstained in 2002.
This trend towards higher abstention has been magnified in other types of election. In European elections, where it has always been high, abstention has risen from 47% in 1994 to 53% in 1999 and 57% in 2004. In regional elections over the same period, abstention rose from 31% in 1992 to 42% in 1998, dropping back to 38% in 2004. More notable still has been the rise of abstention in the first round of elections to the National Assembly, from 30% in 1993 to over 35% in 2002 (with a record abstention of almost 40% in the second round). The French may approve of their institutions, but the referendum of September 2000 on reducing the presidential mandate from 7 to 5 years set an all-time abstention record of 70%, with almost 28 million shunning the polls while 12 million voted.
Added to those who do not vote are those who spoil their ballot. Here too, rates have risen steadily. In presidential election first rounds since 1981, spoilt ballots as a proportion of the vote have been 1.6% (1981), 2% (1988), 2.8% (1995) and 3.4% (2002). When the latter statistic is translated as just under a million votes, its significance becomes more apparent.16 In the legislative election first rounds of 1997 and 2002, 1.3 million and 1.1 million—4.9% and 4.3% of those voting—likewise spoiled their ballot.
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Negative politicisation |
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TopVolatile votersDisaffected votersElectoral fragmentationNegative politicisationA crisis of democracy?ConclusionsNotes |
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The single most disruptive force at work within French politics since the early 1980s has been the FN. The turn in its electoral fortunes has transformed it from little more than a groupuscule into the second party of the right and third party in France after the UMP and PS. In presidential elections, Le Pen opened his account in 1974 with 0.75% (barely 190,000 votes); since then, his score has risen from 14.4% (4.4 million) in 1988 to 17.8% (5.5 million) in the run-off in 2002. Over the same period, the FN has registered its highest scores in the legislative elections of 1997 (15.2%, 3.8 million), the regional elections of 1998 (15%, 3.3 million) and the regional elections of 2004 (14.7%, 3.6 million). It has enjoyed strong representation and influence in regional councils but has failed, in the face of the two-round majority voting system, to gain more than token representation in the National Assembly. The FN has thrived in single-round elections based on proportional representation (regional, European and, exceptionally in 1986, legislative), has performed variably in municipal elections combining majority and proportional elements, and has struggled to convert its support into even a few seats where the two-ballot majority system militates against a party bereft of allies (legislative, cantonal).
This inbuilt futility of voting for the FN in certain elections (especially those to the National Assembly) makes the size and resilience of its support the more remarkable. Present in pronounced form in this electorate are features identified above across the wider French electorate, as the FN has drawn support with a strong tenor of protest from the right, the left, former abstentionists and first-time voters. The previous political affinities of FN voters, the redistribution of their support when the FN is not in the running and their variable political self-classification attest to a highly composite and complex electorate. Asked in a 1997 poll to locate themselves on the political scale, 50% of respondent FN voters placed themselves on the right, 16% on the left and 34% on neither right nor left.17
Certain common features nonetheless emerge. FN voters are the most politically alienated, with the highest proportion of those believing that the democratic process in France is failing (77%) and of those with faith in neither right nor left to govern the country (72%) (Libération, 3.6.97). Poll findings among Le Pen supporters in 2002 showed 93% condemning the remoteness of politicians, 89% believing that ‘most leading politicians are corrupt’ and 89% dismissing right and left alike as ‘more of the same’.18 By any measure, and even allowing for margins of error in the data, these are inordinately high levels of political disenchantment. Despite the proven loyalty of FN voters, moreover, the depth of their identification with the party remains questionable. Consistency of voting and preference for the FN over other parties does not necessarily imply a deep partisan engagement. While the FN electorate exhibits the highest loyalty rate of all major parties (80%–90%), it has been found to contain the lowest proportion of those identifying ‘closely’ with a political party (28%) and of those declaring an ‘interest in politics’ (46%).19 More revealingly, polls have shown that only one in four Le Pen voters in the presidential elections of 1988 and 1995 voted in the hope of seeing him elected, while only one in three FN voters polled in 1990 considered the party capable of governing. Again in 2002, fewer than half of Le Pen’s voters wished to see him elected, while more than a quarter saw his presence in the run-off as ‘a danger for democracy’.20
Such findings counsel against the conclusion that the FN has built a committed electoral base in the normal sense. Rather than voting for the FN as their party of positive choice, many of these electors could be argued to have engaged over successive elections in a form of negative politicisation. They support Le Pen and the FN not through genuine affinity and not in the expectation (or even the hope) of seeing them elected, but largely as an expression of dissatisfaction with the political provision elsewhere. The IFOP poll in 1995 which found only 27% of Le Pen voters supporting him in order that he ‘be elected President of the Republic’ showed 37% doing so in order to have their ‘ideas better represented’ (Libération, 25.4.95). This signals an important distinction, suggesting that for such voters Le Pen and the FN offer a means of forcing issues of concern onto the political agenda, of sanctioning mainstream politicians and parties who have failed to respond with sufficient resolve to those concerns. A SOFRES poll following the 1997 legislative elections found only 29% of FN electors voting ‘in support of [their] chosen candidate’ and 67% voting out of ‘rejection of the other candidates’.21 The 3.8 million voters who backed the FN in these elections did so in the knowledge that it would yield few if any seats in the National Assembly. These are voters who seek their political ‘vote utile’ in an institutional ‘vote inutile’.
Le Pen has recognised this and exploited it to effect. His anti-system discourse and attacks on the ‘bande des quatre’ (‘gang of four’, or in Katz and Mair’s terms, the ‘cartel parties)22 are calculated to strike a chord among disaffected voters. FN voters have emerged throughout as those most concerned by the issues of immigration and law and order in particular, and Le Pen has served them by focusing consistently on these issues. But there is no shortage of other exploitable issues. In the 1993 legislative elections, with investigations into political corruption proceeding apace, the FN made this one of the central themes of its campaign, with an electoral slogan made to measure: ‘Mains propres et tête haute’ (‘Clean Hands and Head Held High’). Similarly, as polling has shown the FN to harbour the highest proportion of voters worried about their personal and occupational future (81% in 1997),23 the party’s once stridently neo-liberal message has become progressively more welfarist and protectionist.
In this way, the FN has exercised a ‘tribunitian’ function similar to that of the PCF in the years of sustained government by the right, harking back to the role occupied on behalf of the common people by the Tribune of the Plebs in ancient Rome.24 Unlike the PCF, the FN fulfils this function outside parliament, offering itself (in the words of one of its early strategists) as ‘the receptacle of all discontent’.25 In the 2002 presidential election, Le Pen found himself challenged in this role not by the institutionalised PCF candidate Hue, but by the Trotskyist outsiders Laguiller and Besancenot, making this the first election where a powerful ‘tribune’ vote—from over a quarter of voters—was mobilised on both extremes.
Yet it would be to misread the FN vote to see it as no more than a protest against the mainstream parties. Le Pen and the FN draw their support from an electorate which subscribes energetically to the ideas they articulate, ideas which command sympathy across the wider electorate at levels regularly exceeding 20% and running as high as 40% on specific issues (Le Monde, 29.5.02). Those who convert this sympathy into a vote are predominantly male, low-wage earners, poorly educated and poorly off (though this most heterogeneous of electorates brings together significant segments of almost every socioprofessional category). By the mid-1990s, the FN had become the ‘party of the working class’ in France while retaining strong lower middle-class support; it was also unrivalled as the party of those considering themselves disadvantaged. In 2002, Le Pen topped the presidential poll among blue- and white-collar workers, shopkeepers and small entrepreneurs; at the same time, the FN leader was credited with up to 38% support among the unemployed.26
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A crisis of democracy? |
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TopVolatile votersDisaffected votersElectoral fragmentationNegative politicisationA crisis of democracy?ConclusionsNotes |
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Does all of the foregoing amount, as the political analyst Jérôme Jaffré has claimed of rising abstentionism, to ‘a serious crisis of politics and of democracy’? Is the ‘social disintegration’ of France today comparable, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Maurice Allais argues, to that preceding the Revolution of 1789?27 That there is a crisis of democracy is unclear, and talk of revolution is surely fanciful, but there are certainly very real problems of political representation in contemporary France and arguably a growing deficit of legitimacy. As a barometer of failing faith in mainstream politics, the elections and opinion surveys reviewed in this article reflect the difficulty which established parties have encountered in responding to the challenges of government and to the demands of an electorate whose voting motivations and behaviour have become less predictable and more complex. If the great ideological doxas of yesteryear have proved ill-adapted to the realities of governing today, they at least offered a clear guide for determining political allegiance. Their waning has left a void that remains to be filled.
It is in the nature of opposition parties to make promises, and in the nature of governments to be burdened by them. But for too long voters in France have measured the mismatch between political discourse and reality. The PS has continued to proclaim adherence to the ideals of the left while increasingly governing to the prescriptions of the centre-right. Chirac, without troubling with ideals, has promised everything to everyone, winning a first presidential term on largely unkept pledges and a second by default. Buoyed briefly in 2003 by his opposition to the American-led invasion of Iraq, the President has sunk in approval ratings that reached a new low point (24%) in summer 2005, when poll projections indicated that he would now lose a presidential election to Jospin—by a margin of 22% (Le Monde, 3.6.05; L’Humanité, 4.7.05). Chirac held his first senior political office some four decades ago; he served as Prime Minister when Harold Wilson was in Downing Street. At 72, he is the embodiment of a sclerotic political establishment which has too long rewarded endurance over innovation.
An important aspect of this political sclerosis lies in the institutional mechanisms whereby national political representatives are elected in France. As the political provision has increased in recent years, the real choice has narrowed. Despite rising abstention and dispersal of votes across a wider front of parties and candidates, the majorities won by increasingly like-minded ‘parties of government’ have been no less imposing for resting on a diminished share of the vote. The sweeping victories of the centre-right parties in 1993 and 2002 were won on lower first-round scores than that which occasioned their historic defeat in 1981; the resurgence of the Socialists in 1997 was effected on a lower first-round vote than that which saw them lose in 1986. Adding those who abstained or spoiled their ballot to those who voted for an anti-system candidate on 21 April 2002 yields a figure of over 22 million—more than half the electoral register. Yet Chirac and his UMP emerged from that election and the subsequent legislative elections with a monopoly of institutional power.
When the Fifth Republic was founded at the height of the Algerian War and in the face of army insurrection in 1958, the objective was not to maximise democratic representation and accountability, but to provide strong leadership in a crisis and overcome the legendary instability of politics under the Fourth Republic. The voting system devised then applies still in its essentials today and is geared to producing solid parliamentary majorities. The experience of the PCF in 1958 anticipated the rules of the electoral game under the Fifth Republic. Having won some 26% of the vote and 26% of National Assembly seats (145) in 1956 under the proportional system of the Fourth Republic, the PCF saw its 18.9% of votes in 1958 converted into just 2.2% of seats, ten to be precise. The most powerful party of 1956 was reduced at a stroke to the weakest by a two-ballot majority voting system that penalised even a party as large as the PCF if it could not attract wider support or forge tactical alliances between the two rounds. The Gaullist Union pour la Nouvelle République (UNR), by contrast, on a lower share of the first-round vote (17.6%) but drawing support from conservative, centre-right and even centre-left voters in the second round, went on to take some 40% of National Assembly seats, 188 in all. This unveiling of the new electoral logic in 1958 would cause all parties to reassess their political alliances and result in the ‘quadrille bipolaire’ discussed at the start of this article.28
As in 1958, so today—with the additional hurdle, since 1976, of a raised qualifying bar in the first round of 12.5% of the electoral register. Any relief at keeping the FN out of the National Assembly must be tempered with the knowledge that up to 15% of the electorate have been effectively disenfranchised (considerably more if one adds the unrepresented support of other, smaller parties across the spectrum). Under the proportional system used in 1986, the FN won 35 seats in the National Assembly; had that system been employed in 1997, it would have gained an estimated 77 seats, making it vital to the formation of a right-of-centre majority (Le Monde, 5.6.97). Instead, under the two-ballot system in 1997, the FN contested the run-off in 132 constituencies and scraped a single seat. By contrast, with a first-round score of less than 10%, but with favourably concentrated support and a well-disposed ally in the PS, the PCF took 37 seats. In 2002, the disparity would be even starker: with 11.3% of the vote, the FN failed to win a seat; with 4.8%, the PCF retained its parliamentary group with 21 seats—while Green candidates with 5.7% secured only three seats and the centre-right DL, with 0.4% (barely 100,000 votes), claimed two.
The problem with electoral cooperation within the centre-right and centre-left blocs is that it reflects the tactical demands of the system, with its impetus towards coalition-building, rather than any political meeting of minds. After 5 years of enforced compromise in government, the inauthenticity of the ‘gauche plurielle’ was exposed when each of its components insisted on running a candidate in the 2002 presidential election, foreclosing the prospect of a left-wing victory. In the legislative elections which followed in 2002, the distortive effects of the two-ballot system again prevailed. With some 57% of the first-round vote between them, the UMP and PS took almost 90% of the seats, and only those parties within the alliance orbit of the UMP and PS took the remainder. The two-ballot system in single-member constituencies thus continues to impose a bipolar effect on elections whereas some element of proportionality would benefit smaller parties and better reflect the changed contours of the political landscape. In 2004, the introduction of a decisive majoritarian element to regional elections which had hitherto been proportionally determined, while it achieved its purpose of reducing the FN’s haul of seats, pointed not towards but away from greater democratisation of regional councils.
Simple reform of the voting system, however, would not address a deeper problem within the French electorate today: the growing disparity between haves and have-nots. The political philosophy with which President Giscard d’Estaing came to office in 1974 rested on the belief that France had already progressed beyond a society structured on class divisions to one in which ‘two out of three French people’ shared broadly the same material well-being and the same aspirations.29 The rosy future envisaged in which this ‘vast middle group’ would simply continue to expand did not survive a presidential term blighted by economic recession. The national population census of 1999 revealed that white-collar and blue-collar workers accounted for some 57% of the working population in France compared with only 12% employed in management and the higher professions and 22% in middle-ranking occupations. Conversely, working-class representatives in French politics have diminished steadily with the decline of the PCF, while women remain seriously under-represented (with fewer than one in eight National Assembly seats) and ethnic minorities are barely represented at all. In 1967, blue- and white-collar ‘députés’ held 51 (over 10%) of the 487 seats in the National Assembly; by 1997, the number had dropped to ten out of 577, leaving 57% of the working population (some 15 million) represented, in sociological terms, by under 2% of ‘députés’ (Le Monde, 2-3.6.02).
The electorate that has been the subject of this article is drawn not from Giscard’s bourgeois Utopia but from those millions who are in a deprived or precarious relationship with the labour market: the unemployed (who account for over 20% of under 25-year-olds), manual, clerical and agricultural workers, those on the guaranteed minimum income (RMI) or minimum wage (SMIC), fixed-term contract workers, part-time or seasonal workers, the displaced, homeless or otherwise excluded. It was economic deprivation through job loss (or the perceived threat of it) more than any other factor which motivated the rejection in May 2005 of the EU constitutional treaty, with the spectre of ‘Anglo-Saxon liberalism’ looming large over the ballot box. Though opposition to the proposed accession of Turkey to the EU was a factor in the ‘no’ vote, it ranked some way below fears of an ultra-liberal Europe that would relocate jobs to the east and allow incoming ‘Polish plumbers’ to undercut their French counterparts in a deregulated labour market.30 An analysis of the referendum carried out for the economic newspaper La Tribune (30.5.05) showed a clear correlation between the precariousness of employment and the vote cast. Among those voting ‘no’ were 71% of temporary employees and 69% of fixed-term contract workers. The scale of monthly income told the same story: a ‘no’ vote was cast by 66% of those earning less than 1,500 Euros a month, 55% of those earning up to 3,000 Euros, 40% of those earning up to 4,500 Euros, and 26% of those earning over 4,500. Paris, rural Brittany and areas least scarred by ‘la crise’ voted in favour, the industrial north and unemployment-plagued south voted overwhelmingly against (Le Monde, 1.6.05; Libération, 1.6.05).
Those most emphatic in their rejection of the constitution (the unemployed, blue- and white-collar workers, agricultural workers and the least educated) represent in many cases the ‘new poor’ whose numbers grew exponentially in the 1980s and 1990s.31 Already in 1990, the impression was firmly embedded in French public opinion that social inequalities had grown since the 1970s, together with disparities in living standards; by the end of the 1990s, almost a third of workers in France felt their jobs to be in danger.32 Those who find themselves at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, or who consider themselves at risk, have come to constitute a reservoir of potential support for far right and far left alike. It was not the main parties of government and opposition which articulated popular concerns in the EU constitutional referendum but an assortment of far-right nationalists, revolutionary communists, Trotskyists and anti-globalisation campaigners, with opportunistic Socialist rebels helping to tip the balance. The rejection of the constitution was the rejection of a European agenda fashioned by an out-of-touch political elite; and the appointment as Prime Minister in June 2005 of the aristocratic Chirac loyalist Dominique de Villepin, a lofty eminence never having held elective office, hardly seemed likely to bring politics back to the people.
It is a warning to be heeded when political choice migrates to the margins. The urgent lesson to be drawn from the past two decades is the need for governing elites in France to reconnect with a disenchanted voting public. There was never a halcyon age when voters and their representatives were seamlessly in tune: the right-wing intellectual Charles Maurras made much a century ago of the severance between the ‘pays légal’ and the ‘pays réel’; the Poujadists won 52 National Assembly seats in 1956 on the slogan ‘Sortez les sortants!’ (‘Kick Out the Outgoing Lot!’); and de Gaulle famously found the events of May 1968 ‘incomprehensible’. Here at least Chirac can claim an illustrious precedent for his bald admission—‘Je ne le comprends pas’—not to understand the anxiety of French youth today (Le Monde, 16.4.05).
In keeping with this breakdown of understanding, the perception has grown of an increasingly remote cartel of parties and politicians who have come to monopolise the institutional space, including those new layers of governance (regional, European) that have been added since the late 1970s. This impression of a cosy cartel has been accentuated by the routinising of rotational and even ‘cohabitational’ government, and to a degree by the widespread practice among French politicians of holding several political offices at once (‘cumul des mandats’). Excluded from the charmed circle, the FN has been left to pose, much as the Poujadists of the 1950s, as the only major party capable of articulating the demands of ordinary people. The problem presents itself more acutely at national than at subnational level; survey evidence suggests that the citizen/representative bond at the municipal level in particular remains strong (and here the ‘cumul des mandats’ can serve for some national politicians as a means of cultivating a local base). A poll conducted in 1990 showed desperately low ratings for political parties and ‘politicians in general’, but confidence levels of 73% for mayors and 70% for the 36,500 local councils (assembling over half a million elected councillors) which form the bedrock of democratic representation in France.33 Proximity clearly constitutes an important factor in the retention or breakdown of political trust.
Other factors can be adduced which argue against the conclusion that democracy itself is in crisis in France. If the first round of the 2002 presidential election witnessed an unprecedented abstention rate, the massive popular protests against Le Pen, the powerful reassertion of the founding values of the Republic and the participation of 3.3 million more electors in a record turnout for the second round reaffirmed the mobilising power of the ballot box when the stakes are considered sufficiently high. The vexed debate generated over Europe in May 2005 and the relatively high turnout in the referendum—just under 70%, as for the Maastricht referendum of 1992—again indicated a reassuring level of democratic engagement (especially when compared with the 42% turnout in the corresponding Spanish referendum of February 2005).
Beyond the formal institutional structures of politics too, there is ample evidence of engagement. The obverse of the political disillusionment discussed here has been the growth of new forms of ‘direct democracy’ which channel their militancy in pursuit of diverse aims (anti-globalisation, defence of small farming, tax reform, employment and environmentalism) and on behalf of diverse groups (low-paid workers, the unemployed, immigrants, ‘sans papiers’, the homeless or badly housed, recipients of welfare benefits and victims of social exclusion in different forms).34 The popular groundswell against the EU constitution, articulated most forcefully by the far-left anti-globalisation collective ATTAC, was described by Libération editor Serge July as an ‘electoral riot’ (31.5.05); and the rioters won. A series of marches, demonstrations and occupations of benefit offices in the mid-1990s, organised mainly by the association Agir ensemble contre le Chômage! (United Action Against Unemployment!), culminated in 1998 in a 1 billion-franc emergency package from Jospin’s government and the index-linking of welfare payments.35 Proof positive that people power remains today, as throughout history, a determining factor in the dynamics of French democracy.
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In a speech delivered at Bayeux in June 1946, General de Gaulle outlined his early conception of the Fifth Republic that he would finally found in 1958. Given the ‘age-old Gallic propensity to divisiveness and quarrelling’, he argued, there was a ‘need for new democratic institutions that will by themselves offset the effects of our perpetual political effervescence’.36 The institutions of the Fifth Republic—with its dominant presidency, strong executive and assured governing majorities—were to be de Gaulle’s solution to this perceived need; and the 23 premiers whom the Fourth Republic would see come and go in 11 years seemed only to bear out his intuition.
In the intervening half-century, the French Republic has enjoyed an unprecedented institutional stability, but it is a stability bought at some price to representative democracy.37 The Constitution of the Fifth Republic, with its presidential emergency powers and subordination of parliament to the executive, can be seen as a set of institutional arrangements fit for purpose in the crisis years of the late 1950s and early 1960s but ill-adapted to the contemporary political context. This is not to deny the gradualist evolution that has taken place: the move away from referenda as a plebiscitary device, the curtailing of presidential power under ‘cohabitation’, the shortening of the presidential mandate from 7 to 5 years, diminished use of Article 49.3 (enforcing the passage of government bills) and recent measures strengthening the role of parliament have all served to make the ‘République gaullienne’ better reflect the popular sovereignty exalted in the Constitution.38 The institutional mechanisms and ‘rationalised democracy’ of the Fifth Republic remain nonetheless important factors in perpetuating the gulf between voters and the political class. The distortive nature of the electoral system creates a National Assembly which rivals in its disproportionality that champion of electoral distortion, the British House of Commons;39 and those parties which benefit most from the system (currently the UMP and PS) are least inclined to undertake any thoroughgoing reform.
As the evidence of this article suggests, however, it is less against France’s political institutions than against their incumbents that popular disaffection has been directed. Electoral abstention, spoilt ballots, negative opinion polls, anti-incumbent voting and support for extremist or fringe parties all trace the graph of mounting dissatisfaction with a political provision that has been lacking in renewal, bold reform and, to a large extent, honesty. Chirac and Mitterrand have between them ruled France for the past 25 years, and the need for change at the top is acutely felt. The President is currently backed by a UMP-controlled National Assembly representing less than half of the electoral register as measured by the first round of voting (or abstaining) in June 2002. Following the rejection of an EU constitutional treaty in which was invested much presidential capital, Chirac looks set to see out the remainder of his term by adding little to his negligible achievement since his rousing promises of 1995.
Returning to the question posed by the title, any answer must be measured. While the electoral volatility and fragmentation discussed in the foregoing pages raise real concerns, their degree should not be overstated. The underlying institutional stability of politics under the Fifth Republic remains, and the legislative elections of 2002 reaffirmed the familiar pattern of centre-right/centre-left bipolarity, with the UMP acting as a federating force reminiscent of the Gaullist UNR. Though electoral demobilisation is also a real concern, the second round of the 2002 presidential election saw the largest turnout ever (32.8 million) in a French national election, just as the constitutional treaty referendum of 2005 witnessed the largest turnout (28.8 million) for any referendum under the Fifth Republic. Finally, while there has been a growth in voting at the extremes, elections are still won and lost in the centre. Despite the sustained challenge of the FN in particular, French politics today continues to exhibit strong characteristics of the moderate pluralism defined by Sartori, with alternative coalitions in bipolar alignment and centripetal competition.40
Yet it is precisely in these comforting assurances that the greatest danger of complacency lies. Some of the more dire warnings about the ‘collapse of official politics’ in France are not borne out;41 but beneath the stability of solid parliamentary majorities and government as usual, there are ever louder rumblings of which notice must be taken. The riots in deprived suburbs of many towns and cities across France in November 2005, involving mainly youths of North African immigrant descent, shook the edifice of the ‘one and indivisible Republic’ and proclaimed how acute the ‘social fracture’ remains in education, jobs, housing conditions and racial discrimination.
The next presidential and parliamentary elections in 2007 will offer the opportunity to forge a new ‘social contract’ between electors and elites. The personality politics that will be played out in the run-up to those elections must be accompanied by clear and realisable programmes to address France’s economic and social ills. Such programmes will need to engage honestly with the question which hung over the 2005 referendum and which has demanded to be addressed since the failure of the ‘Socialist experiment’ in the early 1980s: how can France’s high-cost, state-heavy social model be made compatible with a new economic dynamism to balance the public finances, stimulate growth and bring down chronic unemployment? This most pressing of questions has been evaded as political leaders have taken refuge in an increasingly bankrupt rhetoric of social protection while, on the ground, legions of French workers and unemployed feel that protection is precisely what they lack. A new, mature dialogue is required which acknowledges the limitations on governmental choices imposed by EU membership and the wider economics of globalisation. If a CSA poll published in Le Parisien on 10 October 2005 is any gauge, 76% of the French want such a dialogue (while 75% deem politicians incapable of leading economic recovery and 78% dismiss them as out of touch). Drawing the lessons of the past two decades, French political leaders must now start to promise only what they can deliver and, in a programmed and clearly articulated way, to deliver what they promise.
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1 The author is grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the British Academy for supporting research in France towards this article and thanks Paul Hainsworth and the anonymous referees for valuable comments.
2 E. Rivière, ‘Les sondages peuvent-ils se tromper sans nous tromper?’, Revue Politique et Parlementaire, September–October/November–December 2002.
3 Parti Socialiste; Parti Communiste Français; Rassemblement pour la République; Union pour la Démocratie Française.
4 Electoral statistics are taken from La Documentation Française, Institutions et vie politique en France sous la Ve République, 2003, supplemented by figures from Le Monde dossiers et documents.
5 A. Cole, French Politics and Society, Pearson/Longman, 2005, pp. 137–40.
6 J.A.J. Evans (ed.), The French Party System, Manchester University Press, 2003, pp. 189–200; S. Abrial, B. Cautrès and J. Evans, ‘Stabilité et recomposition du système de partis français’, Revue Politique et Parlementaire, September–October/November–December 2002.
7 Among many examples, SOFRES, Opinion publique 1985, Gallimard, 1985, pp. 21, 113–4.
8 J.G. Shields, ‘Europe’s Other Landslide: The French National Assembly Elections of May–June 1997’, Political Quarterly, October–December 1997.
9 Le Monde, 31.5.05, 1.6.05; Libération, 31.5.05; Le Nouvel Observateur, 9–15.6.05.
10 J. Wolfreys, ‘Shoes, Lies and Videotape: Corruption and the French State’, Modern and Contemporary France, November 2001; J.A.J. Evans, ‘Political Corruption in France’ in M.J. Bull and J.L. Newell (eds), Corruption in Contemporary Politics, Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003.
11 SOFRES, L’Etat de l’opinion 1991, Seuil, 1991, pp. 21, 270–1; SOFRES, L’Etat de l’opinion 2001, Seuil, 2001, pp. 69, 75.
12 SOFRES, L’Etat de l’opinion 1996, Seuil, 1996, p. 305; SOFRES, L’Etat de l’opinion 2001, p. 220.
13 Libération, 19.4.02; SOFRES, L’Etat de l’opinion 1991, p. 13; N. Mayer, ‘Les hauts et les bas du vote Le Pen 2002’, Revue Française de Science Politique, October–December 2002, pp. 515–6.
14 J. Lacouture, De Gaulle, vol. 3: Le Souverain 1959–1970, Seuil, 1986, pp. 635–7.
15 D.S. Bell, Presidential Power in Fifth Republic France, Berg, 2000.
16 In the second round, when voters were confronted with the choice between Chirac and Le Pen, the proportion of spoilt votes rose to 5.4%, almost 1.8 million.
17 P. Perrineau, Le Symptôme Le Pen. Radiographie des Électeurs du Front national, Fayard, 1997, p. 116.
18 Mayer, op. cit., pp. 515–6; SOFRES, L’Etat de l’opinion 2003, Seuil, 2003, pp. 73–4, 87.
19 Perrineau, Le Symptôme Le Pen, p. 116; J. Chiche, F. Haegel and V. Tiberj, ‘Erosion et mobilité partisanes’ in B. Cautrès and N. Mayer (eds), Le nouveau désordre électoral, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2004; M.A. Schain, ‘The National Front and the French Party System’, French Politics and Society, Winter 1999, pp. 2–3.
20 N. Mayer and P. Perrineau, ‘Why do they vote for Le Pen?’, European Journal of Political Research, 22, 1992, p. 133; Libération, 25.4.95; P. Perrineau, ‘La surprise lepéniste et sa suite législative’ in P. Perrineau and C. Ysmal (eds), Le Vote de tous les refus, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2003, pp. 212–3.
21 SOFRES, La Signification du vote des Français aux élections législatives, May–June 1997, p. 25. The author is grateful to Nonna Mayer for providing these data.
22 R.S. Katz and P. Mair, ‘Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party’, Party Politics, January 1995.
23 Perrineau, Le Symptôme Le Pen, p. 116.
24 G. Lavau, A quoi sert le Parti Communiste Français?, Fayard, 1981.
25 J.-C. Cambadélis and E. Osmond, La France blafarde. Une histoire politique de l’extrême droite, Plon, 1998, p. 99.
26 BVA poll, Le Monde dossiers et documents: ‘L’élection présidentielle 23 avril–7 mai 1995’, p. 47; Louis Harris-AOL poll, Libération, 23.4.02; IPSOS poll, Le Monde, 28-29.4.02.
27 SOFRES, L’Etat de l’opinion 2001, p. 67; L’Humanité, 26.5.05.
28 A. Cole and P. Campbell, French Electoral Systems and Elections Since 1789, Gower, 1989, pp. 86, 93–4.
29 V. Giscard d’Estaing, Démocratie Française, Fayard, 1976.
30 Libération, 31.5.05; Le Monde, 31.5.05, 1.6.05; Le Nouvel Observateur, 9–15.6.05.
31 R. Gildea, France Since 1945, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 129–30.
32 SOFRES, L’Etat de l’opinion 1991, p. 109; P. Fysh and J. Wolfreys, The Politics of Racism in France, Palgrave, 2003, p. 227.
33 SOFRES, L’Etat de l’opinion 1991, pp. 270–1.
34 N. Hewlett, Democracy in Modern France, Continuum, 2003, pp. 174–9.
35 Gildea, op. cit., pp. 130–1.
36 C. de Gaulle, Discours et messages, vol. 2: Dans l’attente: février 1946–avril 1958, Plon, 1970, pp. 7–8.
37 Hewlett, op. cit., pp. 98–103.
38 R. Elgie, Political Institutions in Contemporary France, Oxford University Press, 2003.
39 H. Machin, ‘Representation and Distortion in the 1993 French Elections’, Parliamentary Affairs, October 1993; Elgie, op. cit., pp. 159–61.
40 G. Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, Cambridge University Press, 1976, pp. 178–9; Evans (ed.), op. cit., pp. 189–200.
41 Fysh and Wolfreys, op. cit., p. 221.
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