Saturday, June 23, 2007
Power vs. Parity
The parity movement was pushed primarily by feminists of the left. In essence it was an attempt by reformers to use the power of the state to oblige the parties to reform themselves. It hasn't worked particularly well, for reasons discussed here. In the second Fillon government, however, women wield real power, despite the continued under-representation of women in the Chamber. Four key ministries--interior, justice, economy, and higher education--are presided over by women. None is prominently identified with "women's issues."
Rebuilding the Socialist Party
There is no shortage of reform proposals, each airier and vaguer than the next. Essentially, three broad options are mooted: 1) the PS should go "social-democratic"; 2) the PS should become a "party of resistance"; 3) the PS should continue to equivocate about the choice between 1) and 2), as if these were the only genuine options, in the hope of erecting a tent broad enough to accommodate disaffected centrists without alienating the more militant leftist rump.
I will have more to say about each of these options over the next few days. Meanwhile, there are two interesting analyses of the legislative elections to consider, one by the demographer Hervé Le Bras, the other by the geographer Jacques Lévy. Le Bras, confirming CEVIPOF analyses cited here previously in regard to the presidential election, suggests that the PS is losing ground in its traditional working-class bastions and picking up support in areas where Bayrou's MoDem party did well in the first round. Lévy reinforces this conjunctural analysis with a diagnosis of a structural shift in the geographic composition of the PS vote over the past 25 years.
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