03/10/2014
Eduardo Inclán is Maître en Histoire by the University of Toulouse II-Le Mirail
Last Sunday saw the election for the renewal of half the Senate in France, that is, a total of 179 seats voted by the officials ('grands électeurs') of 58 departments. Since 95% of these 'grands électeurs' are representatives elected in the last municipal elections of March, the electoral logic prevailed and the Republican right (UMP and UDI) regained the majority in this chamber, winning 116 new seats for a period of six years, while the forces of the left, including the ruling Socialist Party, only won 59 seats. The extreme-right National Front made it into this camera by getting, for the first time in its history, two seats. In total, the new Senate (348 seats) now has a conservative majority that occupies a total of 188, versus the 155 senators from the leftist groups.
Following these results, the spokesmen of UMP and UDI have celebrated the victory and asked President Hollande for a turnaround in past policies and to accelerate reforms that get the country out of stagnation and crisis, in opposition to government spokesmen who have repeatedly said that this result was already foreseen due to the results of the municipal elections. It is true that there is great inertia in the French Senate which, since the creation of the V Republic, it has generally been dominated by conservative parties due to the weight of the rural vote and of the small municipalities. Parties of the left had managed to change this inertia of the Senate in 2011 alone, but now thing have gone back to normal and the UMP will enjoy a new loudspeaker to make opposition to a shaky government like the Valls cabinet, which doesn't have a stable majority in the National Assembly anymore.
But the odd thing is that no one called for early elections on Sunday night, because they would be in no one's interest, except for Marine Le Pen and her National Front, which seek an electoral victory that launches the presidential campaign of its charismatic leader to the Élysée Palace. The self-declared 'Republican' forces, of both the left and the right, are currently not prepared to face a new election cycle. Some have no clear leaders or candidates (UMP, Left Front, Europe Ecologie) and others are completely separated from their traditional bases of voters (PSF, Communist Party), which is why the inertia will also prevail in the rest of institutions and citizens will have to wait until 2017 to go to the polls. This gives time for President Hollande and Prime Minister Valls to execute the plan they have prepared and which they claim will make France react and set its economy in motion, overcoming its poor electoral prospects and the going down in history as the worst government of the V Republic.
It also gives time to conservative and progressive forces to build a credible and realistic alternative that leads them to power, preventing Europe's second largest economy from falling into the hands of populists and of politicians who want another constitutional system for France, away from the EU and of its international commitments, isolated and with an economic crisis aggravated by bad policies. Therefore, they demand the candidates available to lead this alternative, either Sarkozy or Juppé or any other that may arise, to set to work immediately, to group the vote of various options now quite distanced from each other, and create a clear and realistic program of reforms to be implemented in the first two years in Matignon and the Élysée. Otherwise, French institutions will become unstable toys floating in a sea of dissent and populism, much to the taste of 'bleue marine'.