A fresh path?

With respectively 31.11% and 25.83% of the vote, Nicholas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal attracted, in the first round of the presidential elections in France on 22 April, the support of over half the French electorate. There was also a record voter turnout: 84.6% of those with the right to vote; so high a figure has not been registered since 1965. The runoff between the two leading candidates is due to take place on 6 May. After the first French elections this year (the second round of the presidential elections is due on 6 May, and the election of the Chamber of Deputies in June, again with two rounds), it’s time to reflect on the significance of the first results. There are, it seems to me, three important aspects.First, the very high voter participation needs to be underlined: 84.6% of the electorate, even though there is no obligation to vote. In some cities and regions, the percentage was even higher: 90 or 95%. All commentators welcomed this, stressing the civic sense of the French, traumatized by the memory of 2002 when the far-right National Front party achieved second place. But this interpretation seems rather limited: so high a participation in the vote also expresses a deep apprehension and the wish of citizens to be heard, to be present, and to participate in their own future. The country is going through a crisis on a scale unprecedented since the Second World War, a financial and economic crisis, but especially a moral crisis and a crisis of society, with deep divisions between the French, and daily tensions and outbreaks of violence on a scale never seen before. So exceptional a participation may be interpreted as a call to the civic responsibility of politicians.The second important aspect is the collapse of the various extremist parties of the right or left, parties that are non-democratic, anti-European, and anti-constitutional. This could signify that, in spite of their fear of the future, the French are no longer seduced by the protest vote, but demonstrate their faith instead in the democratic parties, and give proof of considerable maturity in doing so. An extraordinary event was paradoxically little commented on, and yet it constitutes an historic turning-point: namely, the virtual disappearance of the French Communist Party, which got less than 2% of the vote! It’s true that its long decline began years ago: it has now touched the bottom; the fact represents a liberation also for the democratic left. The third aspect is the good result achieved by the centrist candidate of Christian democratic formation, François Bayrou: with 18.57 % of the vote he took third place. The result he achieved testifies to the fact that an ever-growing number of French people reject manichaeism, the brutal head-on conflict between left and right, and wish for a government at the centre, without excluding the idea of establishing coalitions between different parties. These various aspects tend to reduce the uniqueness of the French situation in comparison with the rest of Europe. Could France become a normal democracy, in which a more powerful centre would attenuate the clash between right and left and the notion of compromises and coalitions between the parties would not be excluded? But the problem of the electoral system is crippling. It leads to bipolarisation, it tends to flatten out nuances and eliminate the centre ground. No European state knows an election that resembles the French presidential elections, with this very strong relation between the candidates and the country, and with a second round that is reduced to a battle between two personalities and almost inevitably becomes a clash between two opposing projects for society, without any chance of throwing bridges between them. This situation is accentuated by the electoral system of the legislative elections, which this year follow hard on the heel of the presidential ballot, without any proportional representation; and again with two rounds that repeat the same frontal shock. France seems to have embarked on a fresh path in is political life. The irruption of a large centre in the French political landscape is probably an important event, but it is still not possible to gauge its consequences. The other important event is the collapse of the traditional allies of the Socialist Party, in particular the PCF, but also the Greens (1.57%). It forces the democratic left to seek new allies. The next essential contest, which could lead France to a real modernization of its political life, i.e. to abandoning the archaic clash between two opposite poles, will be the administrative elections, those of the communes and regions, in which a quota of proportional representation does exist. Learning to work together at the local level would mean entering into a system no longer of opposing fronts, no longer a clash between two opposing fronts, but of working together with each other. Is not that modern democracy?