Musings on electoral systems: France’s majority bonuses

The most potent weapon in the arsenal of any opponent of proportional representation is the threat of instability. Israel, the Italian First Republic, the French Fourth Republic, and the Weimar Republic are held up as examples of the problems caused by too many small parties gaining power without responsibility, and by the need for a majority to be composed of many, often dissimilar, political forces. (Ignored, of course, are examples such as India, where first-past-the-post in single-member districts yields the world’s most kaleidoscopic array of parties.) Even where there is stable government, proportional representation is said to give disproportionate power to small parties: a well-known example is Germany’s FDP, who played kingmaker for over three decades, supporting both CDU and SPD governments until the rise of the Greens gave Germany a four-party system.

French regional and municipal elections (for towns with over 3500 residents) use a majority bonus to short-circuit these potential problems. Parties compete in a standard two-round system for top spot; if no winner emerges from the first round, lists which obtained 10% of the vote can take part in the runoff, and may combine with each other, and with parties which scored between 5% and 10%. Three-quarters of seats are distributed proportionally, with the other quarter being given to the winning list. (The bonus is one-half at municipal level, one-fifth in Martinique and French Guiana, and one-sixth in Corsica.) With such an advantage given to the winning party, the election of regional President or Mayor by the newly-elected council becomes a formality, and early elections are rare.

The need to form broad coalitions in order to win the majority bonus leads to alliances being formed prior to the runoff. Similarly to Switzerland’s system of apparentements, parties are given incentives to co-operate and to form multi-party alliances. In the 2010 regional elections, for example, the three main forces on the French left (the Socialists, the Greens, and the communist-led Left Front) fused their lists in most regions between the first round and the runoff; each of these lists already comprised independents and members of smaller parties, as did those of the (post-Gaullist) UMP. In all twenty-one mainland regions, the winning coalition obtained a clear majority of the seats, even when the runoff was a three-way affair between the left, the UMP, and the National Front. (The introduction of this system at regional level was actually spurred by the National Front winning the balance of power in several regional councils during the 1990s.)

Similar majority bonuses are awarded in Greece (the fifty out of three hundred parliamentary seats which New Democracy and SYRIZA recently contested) and Italy (whose electoral systems at all levels of government allocate fixed percentages of seats – usually 55% – to the coalition of parties backing the successful candidate for chief executive). The rest of the world uses other ways of taming proportional representation, such as requiring thresholds for representation or drawing small multi-member districts. The charm of a majority bonus is that instead of favouring the largest parties in a particular polity, it incentivises them to coalesce with smaller ones, who then receive their share of the extra seats if the alliance is victorious.

The majority bonus system could be improved by eliminating the runoff and using the Alternative Vote or Supplementary Vote to determine the winning party. The Swiss apparentement system could substitute for the need for form coalitions; the parties forming an apparentement could have their first-preference votes counted together, protecting the smaller ones from being eliminated from the count. If the executive branch is elected separately from the legislative, the bonus seats could be given to the party or parties supporting the winning candidate. Alternatively, the bonus seats could take the form of at-large seats voted for on a separate ballot using a majoritarian system such as the Block Vote (i.e. the old-fashioned method for electing members of the U.S. Electoral College from each state). With these changes, a proportional electoral system with a majority bonus would be the perfect way to ensure parties are represented according to their support, while early elections and unstable coalitions are avoided.

Allons enfants de la patrie, la jour de gloire est arrivée

The first round of the French presidential election was held on Sunday (Saturday for voters in the overseas territories in the Americas and in French Polynesia), and here are the results:

*François Hollande (Socialist [blairite third-wayers]): 28.56%

*Nicholas Sarkozy (Union for a Popular Movement [tory teabaggers]): 27.07%

*Marine Le Pen (National Front [far-right nutbags]): 18.12%

*Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Left Front [jaurèsian socialists]): 11.1%

*François Bayrou (Democratic Movement [centrists]): 9.11%

*Eva Joly (Europe Ecology The Greens [greenies]): 2.26%

*Nicholas Dupont-Aignan (Arise the Republic [old-school gaullists]): 1.81%

*Philippe Poutou (New Anticapitalist Party [alterglobalisationalists]): 1.16%

*Nathalie Arthaud (Workers’ Struggle [trotskyists]): 0.57%

*Jacques Cheminade (Solidarity and Progress [larouchites]): 0.25%

The big takeaways are (1) Hollande is on track to win the presidency – every poll this month has had him leading at least 53-47 in the second round, to be held on May 6; (2) the major parties may have avoided a repeat of 2002, but the National Front scored its best ever first-round vote and isn’t going away any time soon; (3) Mélenchon has somewhat revitalised the ‘left of the left’, but fell short of the heights that polls had suggested he might achieve.

What does this all mean for France, Europe, and the world? Celebrations for France’s socialists and comparisons to François Mitterrand’s 1981 victory, followed more of the same old shit. The National Front’s momentum might turn a lot of parliamentary seats into three-way contests, helping the Socialists to an ever greater landslide and making them less dependent on the Left Front for support. Everything at this stage points to Hollande reprising Sarkozy’s role as Angela Merkel’s gimp.

And it could get worse: Marine Le Pen’s advisers have spoken of re-creating the FN, which sounds like they are planning to re-brand it in order to make it possible to ally with mainstream right-wing parties (their model would presumably be Italy, where the Alleanza Nazionale used the early-1990s political crisis to de-stigmatise its fascist heritage and make itself a major player in Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition). The prospect of an unpopular and worn-out Hollande facing a UMP-FN fusion in 2017 might be a possibility.

Stay tuned for more fun on May 6.

Mélenchon’s The One!

George’s Political Blog is proud to make its first endorsement. In the first round of the upcoming French presidential election, it will be rooting for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, MEP for the Left Party, candidate of the Left Front, and compulsive blogger.

The decision was an easy one. Apart from two Trotskyist nobodies who will struggle to poll one percent of the vote, Mélenchon is the only candidate in the race who opposes both Europe’s neoliberal economic consensus and the racist demagoguery of the Sarkozy regime. Mélenchon is an old-school French socialist, whose rhetoric is infused with that secularism and universalist republicanism that makes France exceptional among the world’s nation-states. Having served as a minister in the Jospin government (1997-2002), he split from the Socialist Party in 2008, taking another Socialist MP and a Green MP with him to form the Left Party, which forms a part of the Left Front alongside the French Communist Party and a few smaller outfits.

 So far in the campaign, Mélenchon has tapped into the resentment of a large part of the French electorate (his polling numbers are now consistently in double digits and have been as high as 15%) at the injustice of the current culture of austerity emerging in Europe. His rise should be viewed as part of a broader trend across the continent, in which far-left parties are finding success when they ditch their ideological rigidity and adopt a non-specific economic populism. Die Linke in Germany, SYRIZA and Democratic Left in Greece, Left Ecology Freedom in Italy, and Sinn Fein in Ireland have all achieved results by this method. (If only we had such a party in Australia…) Best of all, if he finishes in third place ahead of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen (as polls are starting to show him doing), his performance will help to recalibrate French politics leftward and deliver a blow to the emerging European far-right.

In the second round, François Hollande is the choice by default. If France is forced to suffer another five years of the Bonapartist racist reactionary Nicolas Sarkozy, the heritage of the Revolution will be much worse for wear. But Hollande is a Blairite Third-Wayer, and needs a strong force on his left (in terms of both presidential voting and parliamentary seats) to scare him away from the political centre. For that purpose, Mélenchon’s the one!

French update

Since my last post about the French presidential election, to be held on 22 April and 6 May, a few candidates have dropped out, but there has been little overall movement in the polling.

François Hollande (Socialist) continues to lead, with 28-34% in the first round and 56-60% in the second in all polls conducted so far this month. He has made a few waves in the international media by attacking bankers and Greek austerity measures, but is still seen as a lot more moderate and presidential than the incumbent. Nicolas Sarkozy (Union for a Popular Movement) has 24-26% of the first round vote in February’s polls, but still hasn’t beaten Hollande in a head-to-head second round poll since November 2009 (!) He has unveiled his platform, the centrepiece of which is a series of liberal economic reforms to be enacted by referendum – something which only makes him seem more ‘Bonapartist’, and which would be very embarrassing for him if he lost said referenda.

Marine Le Pen (National Front) is still third, but claims to be having difficulty securing the 500 signatures of elected officials needed to get on the ballot. She polls between 15 and 20 percent, but her absence would allow Sarkozy to challenge Hollande for the first-round lead (although not doing anything to his second-round deficit). Behind her are the centrist François Bayrou (Democratic Movement, 12-14%), the left-of-the-Socialist-Party Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Left Front, 7-8%), Eva Joly (The Greens, 2-4%), and our old friend Dominique de Villepin (United Republic, 1-2%). The most exciting news concerning any of these candidates was that de Villepin’s campaign headquarters were burgled, something which is a little suspicious given that we know that Sarkozy’s people may have had some involvement in Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest.

At the bottom of current polls, unable to rise above one percent, are the Trotskyist Nathalie Arthaud (Workers’ Struggle), the altermondialist Philippe Poutou (New Anticapitalist Party), the centrist environmentalist Corinne Lepage (CAP21), the slightly right-of-centre Hervé Morin (New Centre Party, and who may be on the verge of withdrawing), the Bob Katteresque Frédéric Nihous (Hunting, Fishing, Nature, and Traditions; yes, that is the party’s name!), and the eurosceptic Gaullist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (Arise the Republic). This group of candidates are going nowhere, may not even be on the ballot, and are only good for their amusement value. Morin, who hails from Normandy, provided it recently when he talked about seeing the Allied forces land in 1944, something which would have been rather difficult given that he was born in 1961.

Two other candidates mentioned in my last post have withdrawn: Jean-Pierre Chevènement (Republican and Citizens’ Movement) and Christine Boutin (Christian Democratic Party), both of whom were struggling to even hit one percent. Chevènement is one of the most interesting French politicos in terms of ideology: he is Keynesian, eurosceptic, anti-American, opposed to regional autonomy, and staunchly secular despite establishing the French Council of the Muslim Faith while a minister. His tiny party (he is one of its two MPs) is dependent on the Socialists, so he will almost certainly endorse Hollande. Boutin extracted a price for her endorsement of Sarkozy: a negative comment from him about same-sex marriage (she is its foremost opponent in French politics, and is most remembered for crying in Parliament when civil unions were legalised). Some polls are also testing a candidate named Jacques Cheminade, who ran in 1995 as the candidate of the Solidarity and Progress Party, a LaRouchite outfit, and who assures everyone that he already has the 500 signatures.

If anyone is interested, French Wikipedia has a page dedicated to polling for the election, and new polls are released every few days. The link is here; and note that the pollster CSA has the worst reputation (I’ve seen it referred to as the ‘French Zogby’). Their main page about the election is here, and has pictures of all the candidates (including one of Marine Le Pen playing chess!)

French presidential election preview

France holds its presidential election on April 22 and May 6, 2012, the ninth in the history of the Fifth Republic. A double-digit number of candidates will enter the first round (twelve entered in 2007; French Wikipedia names seventeen potential contenders this time around), with the top two advancing to the second round, held a fortnight later. (No second round would be necessary if a candidate won a first-round majority, but this has never happened.) Typically, the second round will involve a Gaullist and a Socialist, although the neo-fascist National Front made it into second place in 2002, and could conceivably do so again this time.

Incumbent President Nicholas Sarkozy (of the [Gaullist] Union for a Popular Majority) faces an uphill battle in his re-election bid. The three polls taken so far this month (merci beaucoup, Wikipedia) give him between 24.5% and 26% of the first-round vote. His Socialist challenger, François Hollande (former party president and former partner of the party’s 2007 candidate, Ségolène Royal), attracts between 31.5% and 35% in the first round, and between 57% and 60% in a second round battle against Sarkozy. Earlier in the year, it looked as if Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the only potential Socialist nominee who could defeat Sarkozy, the sitting President has become increasingly unpopular and now looks to be gone.

Sarkozy also faces the prospect of finishing third behind the National Front’s Marine Le Pen, but the latest poll shows an increase in his first round vote at the expense of hers. She has fallen back, and could even finish fourth, as François Bayrou of the centrist Democratic Movement appears to be catching up to her. Also in the running, and polling in the single digits, are the candidate of the Left Front (Jean-Luc Mélenchon), a Green (Eva Joly), a Christian democrat with a social conservative streak (Christine Boutin), a Gaullist eurosceptic (Nicolas Dupont-Aignan), a former defence minister whose centrist party has split with Sarkozy’s coalition (Hervé Morin), a former prime minister trying to regain his former relevance (Dominique de Villepin), a left-wing eurosceptic (Jean-Pierre Chevènement), a Trotskyist (Nathalie Arthaud), a centrist green (Corinne Lepage), and an anti-globalisation leftist (Philippe Poutou).

Sarkozy appears to be caught between a centre-right which no longer trusts him, and a far right which found him not to be as sympathetic to their cause as they had hoped. His parliamentary majority has been weakened by the defection of centrist and centre-right parties such as Nouveau Centre (Hervé Morin’s party) and the Parti Radical, while some traditional Gaullists have rallied behind Dominique de Villepin’s candidacy. His government has been beset by scandals (the latest one involving arms sales to Pakistan), and it looks like many voters who supported him the last time will desert him, some going directly to Hollande, while others go to Villepin, Boutin, Morin, or Bayrou in the first round before backing Hollande in the second round.

The next five months will be interesting to watch. Sarkozy has some ground to make up on Hollande, while Le Pen and Bayrou both threaten to make the second round. (Le Pen would certainly lose, while Bayrou could unite the centre and right against the left to win easily…or the centre and left against the right to win easily.) I’m hoping that Hollande wins, and that Bayrou and Morin do well, but I suspect that the margin between Hollande and Sarkozy will narrow between now and then.