Joe Ray

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August 20, 2002 - The Montreal Gazette

PARIS – Up until a week ago, the French left had it in its power to bring president Jacques Chirac to his knees. Yesterday, in the second and final round of parliamentary elections, voters threw the dirt over the grave the left has been digging for itself since the first round of the presidential elections two months ago.

Now, the left’s worst fears for the size of the juggernaut they will be facing in the government have come true.

After five years in the driver’s seat in the French parliament, the left relinquished the wheel to the right, winners of over 55 per cent of the vote.

Before the legislative elections started, the left could have thrown the government back into the paralyzing ‘cohabitation’ and severely limit presidential power. There was even talk of re-examining the constitution and the viability of the Fifth Republic.

Instead, the only time the left motivated its voters in the recent presidential and legislative elections was convincing them to back Chirac to trounce extreme-right candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Too Busy Bickering

While the left squabbled among themselves and complained the right wouldn’t get into an issues-based debate with them, the right did everything the left should have.

They got organized and rewrote the book on how major electoral campaigns work in France.

As soon as the first round of the presidentials were over, leaving Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second round, Chirac assembled an all-star team of insiders and cronies to form the UMP (the Union for Presidential Majority) that allowed the right to present a unified front for the legislatives. Result? The right bulldozed through the first round of legislatives last week and lost no momentum yesterday. Chirac, known to be an old hat with his election skills, now has his canards lined up like never before.

This left the left reacting a week ago to the fact that in 93 of 96 ‘departments’ in mainland France, they did worse in these parliamentary elections than they did five years ago, along with communist leader Robert Hue scrambling for his political life and the left’s only real leader, Lionel Jospin, bowing out of politics, mostly due to the embarrassment behind a botched campaign. The left and their voters, who set a record for abstention levels, seem to have failed like never before.

Once the overwhelming results became public last night, prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who has barely been able to contain the smile of a newborn father he’s worn for the past week, was finally able to come out and say, “Tonight, I understand your joy.”

Failures Repeated

Not only did the left strike out in the presidentials, they couldn’t figure out how the new game was played in time for the legislatives. The similarities in their failures between the first and second rounds of both elections are striking: before both first rounds they were busy squabbling among themselves while complaining that the right wouldn’t talk issues with them. Then, following a staggering first-round loss, they rally to fight for a consolation prize.

For this last round, even the rally was half-hearted. Parisian political science student Anne Bory summed it up, “The right did an excellent job of organizing themselves after the first round of the presidential elections, and the left didn’t do anything. They couldn’t get themselves together for either the presidentials or the legislative.”

When ex-prime minister Lionel Jospin, who along with Chirac, was thought to be a shoo-in into the second round of the presidentials, bowed out of politics once he lost to Le Pen, the already-divided left was left leaderless, and no changes came out of his loss.

Jospin, often considered more of a leader by default than desire, had tried to use a ‘business as usual’ tactic going into the first round of presidential elections, and once he bowed out, no one was ready to take the lead.

However, Socialists leader François Hollande, one of the heirs-apparent to the throne of leadership for the left, needed to devote his time to making sure he got re-elected in his constituency, and couldn’t assume the leadership role the left desperately needed. As a result, the left continue in their business-as-usual style.

“The left’s campaign was quite feeble and lacked punch,” said Parisian Jean-François Bruneau after voting in Paris’s third arrondissment, “The UMP’s tactics really helped them avoid the catastrophe of the left.”

Jospin, for his part, made a few phone calls to encourage leaders on the left to keep up the good work.

The signs were there after last week’s first round that if voters didn’t motivate themselves to vote strongly for the left in this round, they would be looking at five uphill years in the government.

Liberation, the left-leaning daily summed it up with the headline on the front of their Saturday edition, “Watch out for the blue (right) tide.”

Conservative parties together won from 385 to 399 seats of the 577 seats in France’s lawmaking body, exit polls showed. The left, including the Socialists, the Communists and the Green Party, won from 178 to 192 seats. The extreme-right National Front failed to win any seats.

The Interior Ministry reported that with 96 per cent of the vote counted, the right had 55 per cent and the left had 45 per cent.

Control of the National Assembly goes to the party or coalition with an absolute majority.

The left can’t be entirely left to blame; two other factors also played heavily into their legislative election troubles: cohabitation and voter apathy.

Cohabitation is the clumsy and lumbering system that forces a president from one party to take on a prime minister from another, as Chirac was forced to do for the past five years with Prime Minister Jospin.

This is more than French voters could bear, as they are looking to the government to concentrate and make progress on issues like security, taxes and employment.

Apathy was particularly strong in each election of the past two months except the final, anti-Le Pen, round of the presidentials. Many simply could not motivate themselves to vote for a system from which they feel detached.

The best tactic the left could come up with after last week’s setback was going after the first-round abstainers, and like the week before, they voters did not come out for the left as the left hoped.

“When people from the left have a government they really can’t stand,” said Bory, citing the situation around the 1997 legislative elections after two years with a cabinet from the right, “the left comes out in force to say they’ve had enough.”

This time, however, with the next major elections five years away, the left seems to have written their own epitaph for the foreseeable future.

AP contributed to this report