La Grogne

The knives are out in the UMP. The silence that had prevailed during the state of grace but for a few exceptional cries and whispers--a Villepin lashing out against his persecution, a Copé inconsolable for want of un maroquin, a Lellouche bemoaning the need for vaseline to ease the pain--has given way to a more general grumbling, led by the normally avuncular Jean-Pierre Raffarin. "When I see the number of cities we lost with 49 percent, I say that the Attali Report was one of the reasons why we lost." How fitting that Raffarin, whose name adorns the Raffarin Law, which, along with the Galland and Royer Laws, is among the principal targets of the report, should be the one to remind his colleagues that while a "modernized right" may please the MEDEF, the economists, and the OECD, it doesn't win the votes of Main Street merchants, cab drivers, or hairdressers. The corporatist right may be limping, but it can still kick. Meanwhile, in Paris, Lellouche, the perpetual malcontent, is refusing to sit with colleagues who backed his rival in the 8th, Philippe Lebel, while Claude Goasguen, one of Lellouche's enemies, is threatening to cut himself off from the national party leadership. Victory, they say, has a thousand fathers, while defeat ...

Brownian Motion

So I've read the press and the comments on the blog, consulted the map, and perused the tables. The Left picked up 38 large cities and wants to read this as a national mandate; the Right lost Toulouse and Périgueux and Amiens and Metz and Caen yet wants to read this as a national mandate to accelerate its reforms, and the Wall Street Journal agrees.

As an erstwhile physicist, I see random fluctuations. It's like the quantum theory of magnetism. In various places the temperature has risen a little, and spins once aligned to the right have come unstuck. In other places a minor fluctuation in the ambient field has flipped the spin alignment to the left. Averaging over the entire hexagonal domain there's been a slight leftward drift.

Did government personalities fare particularly badly? Darcos, Lagarde, Yade and a few others lost; Dati, Estrosi, and Wauquiez won.

The other day someone mentioned the "pothole" effect in local elections: mayors who fill potholes and ensure that the garbage is collected get re-elected, other things equal. Combine this with a few velleities about the way things are going nationally, and you get the sort of mixed picture that emerges from this election. When the noise dies down, not much will have changed. Sarko is a bit chastened--but the approval polls had chastened him already. His party troops are restless, and he has stroked them appropriately in the hope of restoring calm. The Socialists are bucked up a bit, and they surely needed some bucking up. The Communists and the Frontists continue to dwindle together. And the Bourse collapses, which will ensure that this election will be forgotten even more quickly than most.

Seeing What You Want to See

Here's how the Wall Street Journal plays the municipal results:

PARIS -- The ruling center-right UMP party of Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated in local elections Sunday, putting even more pressure on the French president to forge ahead with his promised overhaul of the country's sluggish economy.

Well, that's one interpretation, I guess.

A Dispiriting Victory for the Left

The Left took Toulouse but lost Marseille. It knocked out Xavier Darcos in Périgueux and put down François Bayrou in Pau. But it failed to mobilize voters--the abstention rate was the highest in decades.

This dispiriting victory may nevertheless be a blessing in disguise. A more robust sanction vote against the Right would have induced a false sense of security. This lackluster win should remind all Socialists that the need for a thorough renovation of the party remains its first challenge.

Bayrou's Loss

François Bayrou has lost his bid to remain mayor of Pau. It is hard to see where he goes from here. His strength of a year ago came from his being neither Nicolas Sarkozy nor Ségolène Royal, a ni-ni that seemed to please nearly a fifth of the electorate. But how much real positive sentiment was there for Bayrou? Quite a lot, he flattered himself, but since then his presidential ambitions and rejectionist stance have alienated many in his own party and, now, apparently, many voters in his home town. He has not been an effective critic of Sarkozy and has not put forward a distinctive centrist position on major national issues. Like Sarkozy, he tried to build his ambition around a cult of personality, but cults of personality are not really the stuff of centrist movements. The center needs to renovate itself almost as badly as the Socialist Party does. Ségolène Royal may still be entertaining some version of the morganatic marriage she proposed to Bayrou between the two rounds of the presidential election: Wed the two parties from the top down, she seemed to suggest, take the main prize, and then divide power according to the respective contributions of each partner. With Bayrou deflated, she will have to refashion her appeal to the center and offer something compelling to the rank-and-file of MoDem rather than a mere prize to the party's now vulnerable leader.

Ségo on the Go

Marianne waxes ironic at Ségolène Royal's expense, having a bit of fun with the vapidness of the message of support she has offered to Socialist lists in dozens of cities around the country. But Marianne misses the point. No other personality of the left has managed to represent the national stakes of the municipal elections with equal effectiveness. Sure, there has been plenty of talk of a sanction vote against the government, but no one else has carried that message on his or her shoulders. Certainly not François Hollande. And the other national leaders of the PS have either been too busy tending their own fiefs or too wary of courting ridicule of the sort that Marianne is dishing out. Landerneau is a place that people make fun of, but you can't win elections without going to Landerneau.

The right hasn't had a national standard-bearer either. True, Sarko went to Toulon, and Juppé and Fillon tried to shore up Darcos's sagging fortunes in Périgueux, but no one has been on the road every day. Patrick Devedjian has begun to catch flak for failing to mobilize his troops. Ségo a fait le don de sa personne, and as in the past she continues to be mocked for it: la madone, the journalist calls her. So perhaps it is worth recalling that in days of yore, people who had no use for the ecclesiastical hierarchical nevertheless worshiped the Madonna.

Sitting It Out

Eric Dupin makes several important points in this discussion of the municipals:

1. The abstention rate was unusually high, rising to 38.9 pct in communes with populations above 3,500, a new record.

2. 32 pct of the abstainers voted for Sarko in the first round of the presidentials, compared with 15 for Bayrou and only 9 for Royal.

3. The most marked abstention of UMP voters was in the "popular" classes, but the turnout of left-wing voters in this group was also low. In other words, there was no massive "sanction" vote against the government.

4. In cities with populations greater than 30,000, there are 55 triangular runoffs and 13 quandrangulars.

From (4) one can infer that the turbulence in the center of the political spectrum, already attested to by Bayrou's good showing in the first round of the presidentials, continues. But neither Bayrou himself nor MoDem has been able to capitalize on this. The bipolar logic of the system is strong, and a centrist party has no choice but to tilt one way or the other, leading to incoherence at the national level. What centrist voters seem to want is a "third way," a vision clearly distinct from what is on offer from both Left and Right.

(5) Incoherence is not limited to the center. The PS has rejected alliances with the LCR while accepting alliances with the other Trotskyite party, Lutte Ouvrière.

ADDENDUM: Justin (see comments) points out an interesting discussion of the abstention rate here. For Ceteris Paribus, it was the enthusiasm aroused by the 2007 presidential campaign, which both swelled the voting lists and ensured a high turnout then, that can be blamed for the diminished turnout now, as new voters abstained in disproportionate numbers.

Republican Discipline

"Republican discipline"--the withdrawal of the less well-placed candidate of a given "political family" in the second round of an election--seems to be breaking down on the left. In Aubervilliers, the Socialist deputy mayor, who finished 358 votes behind the PCF mayor, is staying in the race, forcing a quadrangular contest. Meanwhile, Razzy Hammadi, parachuté into Orly where he was supposed to represent the the new more diverse face of the PS, claims that he was done in by a PCF that failed to honor its pre-election list-merger agreement.

Local flare-ups or signs of still more trouble on the left? The left that remains closed to l'ouverture is in many ways now frozen out of national politics and confined to the local and regional, so it's not surprising that competition for these prizes has intensified.

The Naked Public Square

For an eyewitness account of how the language of identity, ethnicity, religion, and race was deployed in one French suburb in the municipal elections, see here. Among the samples: "Vote for X, he's a Muslim like you." "If Y wins, the sale of alcohol will be prohibited, city hall will close on Fridays, and there will be separate entrances for men and women at the municipal pool." "X is un harki." "This is not Saudi Arabia."

It seems clear that the naked public square is not as easy to achieve as some proponents of le républicanisme du bon vieux temps would have you believe. Is denial really the best way to deal with the existence of "communities"? A community, after all, is a fictional construct with real effects. Its contours are fluid, its boundaries permeable, its members torn in many directions. But solidarity is an important part of political as well as individual life. The ascent from the particular to the general is part of the work of politics. Pace Rousseau, it does not happen without effort. It is not some sort of miraculous transmogrification. Politicians must work with the real in service of the ideal.

Islamophobia in the Media

Via Sarkozy the American, I learn of an op-ed in the egregious Washington Times, an American newspaper financed by Sun Myung Moon. The editorial is by Paul Beliën, a journalist close to the Belgian extreme right. His wife is a deputy of the Vlaams Belang, a xenophobic nationalist party. Beliën, whose op-ed is mainly taken up with an expression of his disappointment in Sarkozy, whose election he supported, has this to say about the Mediterranean Union:

Last week Mr. Sarkozy and Mrs. Merkel gave a joint press conference announcing the establishment of a "Mediterranean Union," an international organization that will encompass the 27 EU member states plus all the countries on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. This plan is the first step in merging Europe with the Islamic world. Mr. Sarkozy wants France and Algeria, a former French colony where many of the "thugs" in the French no-go zones come from, to form the axis of such a future Mediterranean Union.

If this bit of lunatic raving is typical of people who share Mr. Beliën's general views, Sarko may well have his work cut out for him in keeping the xenophobes among his supporters in his coalition, despite his effort yesterday in Toulon to re-emphasize his commitment to a tough immigration policy. This speech was intended, among other things, to give a boost to UMP candidates in Toulouse, Nice, and Marseille, where immigration is a central issue in close municipal races.

The Smaller Parties

In 2001, the Front National was present in the second round in 41 municipalities; this year it will be present in only 8. By contrast, the PCF, the Greens, and the LCR all improved their positions in the municipal elections. According to Marie-George Buffet, the PCF will elect mayors in 800 communes next week. The LCR did well enough to negotiate for what it calls "technical fusions" of its lists with those of other parties (without pledges to cooperate in city management and with full political independence). It would be interesting to know how many former FN voters redistributed themselves among these three parties. Extreme right and extreme left as vases communicants: an interesting thought, but one that might not withstand scrutiny.

MoDem, meanwhile, collected only 3.74 pct of the vote nationwide, far short of the 7 pct it hoped to attain, but it is in a position to influence the outcome in a number of large cities. Here is a rundown of the alliances it has negotiated.

Delanoë Says No to MoDem

Bertrand Delanoë has decided to ally with les Verts and to reject overtures from MoDem in Paris, where 3 arrondissements are at issue: 5th, 7th, and 14th. MoDem may find itself entirely frozen out in Paris. And so much for Ségolène Royal's proposal of a PS-MoDem alliance "everywhere."

A Note on the Municipals

Commenter Ben wrote:

On a side note, Segolene's call for an overall alliance tonight is just as tactical as it is strategic. The writing on the wall is that Bertrand Delanoë is going to ally himself with the MoDem in Paris therefore accomplishing a PS wet dream of an alliance going from the Communists and the Greens to the Center.

It would have been very damaging to her in the forecasted fight between the two to be the next PS Presidential candidate if she had let Delanoë be at the forefront of that new potential political configuration. Events sort of forced her to make that overreaching call (since the MoDem is clearly allied with the UMP is a good number of cities) to try to "top" Delanoë's likely achievement this week.

I think this comment overstates the case. For one thing, Royal has been calling for a "broad party of the left stretching from MoDem to the extreme left" ever since she made her post-election return a few months ago. See, in particular, my remarks on her appearances in Cambridge, where she made this goal quite explicit. So I don't think there was any need to pre-empt Delanoë, who has been very discreet about what program, if any, he intends to put forward in a bid for the party leadership.

Second, Delanoë may choose to forgo any explicit overture to MoDem, since he is in a strong enough position to win without making any such concession. He might even enhance his position in the party leadership contest by availing himself of this strength and avoiding unnecessary and ambiguous compromise. Only in the 5th Arr., where Lynne Cohen-Solal's PS list is 3 points behind Jean Tiberi's UMP, does an alliance with MoDem seem indispensable.

Third, I agree with Ben that Royal's weakness remains her lack of clarity about what principles underlie her readiness to make tactical compromises. That's why I included Nouveau Centre in my remarks. To ally with MoDem is to indicate an opening to the center that is purely anti-Sarkozyste. It would be a quite different thing if a candidate for the PS leadership were to say, We are prepared to welcome centrists who agree with us on such-and-such definition of "the social market economy," or some such formula, regardless of where they stand on Sarkozy, and regardless of their position vis-à-vis potential coalition members who stand to the left of the PS. That would signal a genuine shift. If the municipal elections signify anything for the future of politics at the national level (and I don't think they signify much), it is that rejection of Sarkozy as a personality is not a winning strategy for the Left. With Sarkozy arguably at the nadir of his popularity, still the Left scored only 47 percent nationally.

Summary of First Round Results

Here.

Sanction or Siren Call?

The Left has done well in the first round of the municipal elections, collecting about 47 percent of the vote nationwide, against about 40 percent for the Right. But what do the results mean, and how should the Left capitalize on its gains. Ségolène Royal's position is clear: wherever possible the Left should forge an alliance with MoDem. She is clearly signaling her intention to pull the Socialist Party toward the center, where she saw her best hope of winning in the last presidential election and evidently still sees her best chance of winning both in the next and in the impending struggle for party leadership. Of course the MoDem is not the only organized political entity in the center of the political spectrum. There is also Nouveau Centre. But MoDem offers the tactical advantage of having declared itself, through François Bayrou, to be openly anti-Sarkozyste.

As a political force, however, Bayrou may be a spent round. He is even in difficulty in his own fief, Pau. His strength derived from his being neither Ségo nor Sarko, and it is hard to see how Ségo can turn that ni-ni-ness into a trump in her own hand. At the same time, she has handed her enemies in the PS a card that can be played against her: the meaning of an alliance with MoDem is at best murky in terms of actual policy or political reorientation of the party. Fabius has not been slow to wield this weapon, and others will surely follow.

Town and Country

Bakchich proposes in advance of the municipal elections a thesis to explain why the Left may increase its hold on cities without regaining its hold on le peuple de gauche. The idea is that the rising cost of lodging in urban centers has led to a redistribution of the population, with the working class increasingly forced out of the center and into the semi-rural periphery. The cadres who live in the cities increasingly favor the Left, while the working class increasingly votes for the right. It's a provocative idea, for which it would be nice to see some persuasive evidence.

Gérard Courtois, Le Monde's editorial director, offers exactly the same analysis here.

Municipal Elections Tomorrow

The first round of the municipal elections is tomorrow. Here are Le Monde's predictions for 64 major cities.

Diversity Candidates

Across France, some 520,000 candidates are running for municipal office in the upcoming elections. Of those, how many are "visible minorities"?

Answer: roughly 2,000.

An astonishingly small number.

The Extremes

Les extrêmes se touchent is a Pascalian thought, which I wrench out of context to introduce a very interesting article by Éric Dupin on the state of play in the municipal elections. Of particular note is the decline of the Front National, which has been unable to mount a ticket in Dreux, the city in which it made its first electoral breakthrough in 1983 (for details, see the book by François Gaspard, A Small City in France). Indeed, it has a presence in only 85 French cities.

Meanwhile, on the extreme left, Lutte Ouvrière, the party of the venerable Arlette Laguiller, which has been steadily losing ground to Olivier Besancenot's Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, has negotiated what Dupin calls "a strategic hairpin turn," choosing a strategy of alliance with other parties of the left rather than attempt to maintain independent lists everywhere. Of course it would be a more significant sign if LCR, the stronger party on the extreme left, did the same. Such a move might presage a real "renovation" of the broad left. But that doesn't seem to be happening.

Dupin also considers what might be called, with tongue only slightly in cheek, the "extreme center," François Bayrou's MoDem, which seems to have no national strategy and to be availing itself instead of tactical opportunities where and as they arise. Dupin covers the various options well.

Local Government in France

nonfiction.fr has a special section devoted to local government in France.