Feature Page: Voters in France reject right-wing parties

by Paul Ransom

The French regional elections, which concluded on March 21, were a powerful repudiation of the right-wing government of Jacques Chirac and his premier, Jean Pierre Raffarin. Out of the 22 regions in continental France, the right-wing coalition captured only two. It had dominated 14 — that is, two thirds of the regional governments going into the elections.

The parliamentary left coalition dominated by the Socialist Party, and including the Communists and Greens, got about 50 percent of the vote, the right coalition got about a third, and the fascist-like National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen got about 14 percent.

The rejection of the right was so resounding that it prompted calls for Raffarin’s resignation. (The premier is elected by parliament; the president, Chirac, is elected by popular vote for a seven-year term.) Chirac was elected president on May 5, 2003, by an overwhelming vote in the second round of the presidential elections, essentially because the left parties called for a vote for him to stop Le Pen.

Actually, his vote in the first round did not represent a significant shift to the right. The results were determined by a revolt of working-class and left voters against the Socialist Party, which has been the governing party in France for most of the last 20 years and had carried out the policy of the right rather than the policies voted for by its supporters.

The very poor vote a year ago for Lionel Jospin, the SP’s presidential candidate, allowed Le Pen to get into the second round and created a panic on the left. The heavy vote for Chirac in the second round led to a victory of the right in the parliamentary elections that followed. That allowed the right to begin to implement its program of cuts in social spending, in particular pension rights. But its attempts were met with massive protests.

The reaction to the right’s attacks on the gains of workers was the basis for its electoral disaster in the regional elections. The polls prior to the elections had indicated that a large section of the electorate were even thinking of voting for the revolutionary candidates of the bloc of Lutte Ouvriere (Workers Struggle) and the Ligue Revolutionnaire Communiste, the French section of the Fourth International and Socialist Action’s cothinkers in France.

The LO/LCR bloc, however, did not make the electoral breakthrough that had seemed possible. It got just under 5 percent. The main reason for this seems to have been that, facing the attacks of the right, most voters looked for an immediate practical alternative in the parliamentary left parties, despite their well known betrayals.

Some changes in the rules of the elections were also unfavorable to smaller parties, such as raising the threshold for participation in the second round of the elections from 5 to 10 percent.

In its April 1 issue, Rouge, the weekly newspaper of the LCR, noted that studies of the vote showed that the LO/LCR bloc got 13 percent in the 24-35 age bracket—that is, among younger working people. It got 8 percent among manual workers. The total LO/LCR vote was 1,078,000, or 145,00 more than the combined results of the two parties running separately in the 1998 regional elections.

This article first appeared in the May 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.