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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