France – Legislative elections

In France, the first round of the legislative election was held on Sunday. The second round will be held this Sunday. These elections are Matthew Shugart calls ‘honeymoon elections’, meaning that they occurred just after a presidential election. At such elections, we would expect the newly elected president’s party to do well.

The hypothesis held up very well. Here is a graphic for the 2012 election compared with the 2007 election (which was also a honeymoon election, but for the right):

This graphic also shows that the extreme right did much better this time than five years ago.

Overall, 36 deputies were elected at the first ballot, 23 socialists, 7 from the right-wing UMP, two Radicals, one ecologist, one centrist, and two others. Also, 12 seats will be contested by only one candidate at the second ballot.

The projections suggest that the left will easily win a majority next Sunday. It is just possible that the Socialist party (PS) could have a majority by itself. Even if it does, though, it is still committed to a coalition with the Greens.

While the overall result of the second round of the election is not really in doubt, the interest lies in the impact of the National Front and certain specific contests.

The FN is likely to contest about 60 constituencies at the second round and there are likely to be around 30 constituencies where the FN candidate has won enough votes to compete against both the Socialist and the UMP candidate. These are so-called ‘triangulaires’, or three-way contests. These elections are the most interesting because either the FN vote splits the right-wing vote and the Socialist wins, or the anti-FN vote splits between the PS and the UMP and the FN wins. Overall, the National Front is likely to return a very small number of deputies, perhaps between one and five.

The most interesting specific contest concerns Ségolène Royal. She was the Socialist candidate at the 2007 presidential election when she lost to Nicolas Sarkozy. She is the ex-partner of the new Socialist president, François Hollande. If elected, she is likely to be elected as the new President of the National Assembly. However, she is challenged by a dissident socialist, who is doing very well and who is well placed to beat her on Sunday. This would be news in itself, but President Hollande’s current partner, Valerie Trierweiler, has announced on Twitter that she is supporting the dissident. For his part, President Hollande is supporting Royal. So, there is an intriguing combination of politics and personal life playing out in public.

I will post about the result of the second round next week.

 

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