04/04/2014
Eduardo Inclán is a Maître en Histoire by the University Toulouse II-Le Mirail
While the final result of the French local elections, held on 23 and 30 March, seems broadly clear, a more detailed analysis reveals that all political forces are still showing internal weaknesses. The first of said weaknesses has been the continuous fall in electoral participation, of almost 2 points, from 65.2% to 63.4%. Refusal to vote has not been the newest factor in these elections, but it has risen.
Starting off with the winners, the Union for a Popular Movement party (for the moment led by Jean François Coppé, awaiting Nicolas Sarkozy’s return in the medium term) has managed to regroup the centre-right vote, unlike what happened in the 2008 local elections. At that time, both the differences with François Bayrou’s MoDem centrists and campaigns that lacked focus on local issues, partly due to president Sarkozy’s excessively personalist politics, led the party to disastrous results and to lose important institutions, as had previously happened in the regional elections.
Now that socialists are in office at the Elysée Palace and lack a clear political course, the UMP party has been able to reach agreements with centrists and non-integrated small right-wing parties and, above all, to mark the ideological distance from the Front National, which has implied a strategically important victory just two months before the European elections.
The UMP party and its allies have won 4,978 town halls and more than 104,000 local councillors, nearly half of the total, outpacing the French Socialist Party, which only won 3,023 town halls and slightly over 68,700 local councillors. Extreme left-wing parties (French Communist Party, Radical Party and Front de Gauche allies) have won 98 town halls and 2,872 local councillors; Europe Ecologie-The Greens, 11 town halls; Marine Le Pen’s Front National (who has drawn a lot of media attention throughout these elections) has won 10 town halls and almost 1,500 local councillors, as well as the victory of the candidate for the city of Béziers, who was supported by FN and other right-wing local forces. Other forces have won 1,730 town halls, highlighting the victory of MoDem’s president, François Bayrou, who returns to the political scenery after winning Pau’s town hall.
However, presenting the results this way can lead to some misunderstanding. The centre-right has clearly won this elections by maintaining its main institutions, such as Marseilles and Bordeaux, and has, moreover, regained its national leadership in the surveys, reaching 22%. But it still lacks a clear leader to direct the opposition against president Hollande and continues to be seen in the media as a force that is in the midst of an everlasting fratricidal battle. It is true that the UMP party has regained in these elections some countries which it had lost in 2008, such as Toulouse, Angers, Amiens and Caen, traditionally right-wing cities that now continue to be so, after a left-wing term of office. It is also true that it has conquered traditionally left-wing cities (Limoges and some of Brittany’s cities, as well as some of the former Paris “Red Belt” ). However, it has failed in several strategic battles, such as Paris, Lyon and Strasbourg, which were governed by the right for decades but will still be governed by the French Socialist Party for six more years. The UMP party has meaningfully lost an emblematic city, Avignon, which passes to the left due to the significant increase in the FN vote.
The French Socialist Party has been heavily defeated; as a result, president Hollande has hastened the downfall of Jean Marc Ayrault’s government and replaced him with the best-regarded minister of the cabinet, Manuel Valls, who was, until now, interior minister. This new government is supposed to do more conservative politics, trying to establish the foundations for getting the country out of the economic stagnation which has lasted for years. But the electoral results show that the left has managed to maintain its position in its traditional strongholds, that it continues to be 3 points from the UMP party in the surveys and, above all, that it continues to maintain the most important local bastions, such as Paris (the leader of which is Cádiz-born Anne Hidalgo), Lille and Lyon, despite losing the control of several metropolitan communities of some major French cities.