The first round of the French presidential election turned into a joyous rout not just of the far-right bogey of 2002, but of a whole stack of preconceptions about French politics today. From voter apathy, through flagging socialism to male chauvinism, the French dispelled every hand-wringing lament about their electoral credentials.
The near-record turnout demolished with conclusive Gallic panache the notion that the French had given up on voting. It is true that they had not voted in anything like such numbers in recent elections, and that they were plain negligent five years ago when they simply assumed that the second round would, as always, pit left against right. To that extent, Sunday’s vote was a reaction to that miscalculation. But it was also an inspiring vindication of democracy. The French took a long time to make up their minds, but they were not apathetic. They valued their vote.
An endearing feature of first-round presidential elections in France has always been the assortment of colorful candidates representing single issues, or just themselves. In the past, the first-round vote was often a frivolous option before the serious business of the run-off. In 2007, this was no longer true. For these small parties, this election was little short of a catastrophe. Even the Greens polled less than 2 percent. French politics today is a recognizably four-party contest with a mainstream left, right and center, and a residue of Vichy tendencies preserved in the far-right National Front.
Ségolène Royal’s 25.9 percent of the vote definitively quashed two fixed ideas at once. Ever since the shock five years ago, when Lionel Jospin failed to qualify for the second round, the accepted view of the Socialist Party was that it was in terminal decline. After Jospin’s summary departure, it remained hopelessly divided, lost in its own ideological small print, at sixes and sevens over tactics and riven by personal ambitions. Had the party failed to make the run-off this time, Mme Royal would have been blamed for drilling the final nail into its coffin.
Hers was a divisive candidacy. There were some in her party who felt she was too third-way “Blairite”; others who felt that her ambitious spending program mired her in the party’s bad old statist past. And there was muttering until the last that the party should have chosen someone more experienced (Dominique Strauss Kahn, perhaps). Only last week, some grandees called for Mme Royal to commit to an alliance with the centrist candidate, François Bayrou, fearing that she could trail in third.
The election may not have silenced all these qualms. But it has established that France still has a political left: At least one quarter of the electorate chose it in preference to the center-right and centrist alternatives. The Socialist Party has a future, even if no one is precisely sure what it is. Reports of its death were premature.
Defying all the doom-mongering among Socialists, Mme Royal gained the party’s highest first-round vote since François Mitterrand stood successfully for re-election in 1988. For any first-time candidate this would be impressive; for France’s first serious female presidential hopeful, it was doubly so. Mme Royal made mistakes; her inexperience was exposed, and perhaps her lack of political “feel”. The notion that the French would not vote for a female president, however, was shattered.
Far from being a liability to her party, she may have been an asset with some voters. Her fresh approach, the battle scars inflicted by the party “dinosaurs” during her campaign for the nomination, plus her stout defense of France’s social state seem to have commended her not just to other women, but to younger voters and the better educated.
These are all reasons to believe that the run-off between Mme Royal and the center-right front-runner, Nicolas Sarkozy, may be closer than initial projections suggest. The first round showed that the French are in voting mood, that the political left still has a place in their hearts, and that they are not averse to electing a female president. It also put M Bayrou’s centrist votes into contention — at almost 20 percent, a significant proportion of the total.
Mme Royal has to show that her relative inexperience in national office promises innovation not incompetence, and that she can command conviction on the wider international stage. It is a lot to do in less than two weeks. Given where she was six months ago, however, and the determination that has brought her this far, victory is not yet beyond her — or the Socialist Party’s — grasp.
