06/10/2002 Archived Entry: "French Elections & the Republicans lesson"

The real French Election is happening this next Sunday, with the first primary having happened, and the runoff awaiting for results about the make-up of the new parliamentary. The US press is all over itself presenting the first round of voting as a huge success for the center-right alliance of Chirac, French Punish Left and Far Right in Vote for Parliament, portraying the outcome as in line with a left-wing decline across Europe, the Victory at Hand for conservatives:

Winning an estimated 44 percent in the first of the two voting rounds, the center-right took a solid lead Sunday over the Socialists and their Communist and ecologist Greens partners, who scored a total of 37 percent amid mass abstention.

But take a closer look and read the fine print:

With half the constituencies counted today, the Interior Ministry said that around 35 percent of voters, mostly young and left-wing, had stayed away.... An oddity of today's vote was its huge number of candidates, 8,400, about one-third higher than in 1997.... After his re-election, Mr.Chirac created a center-right electoral alliance, the Union for the Presidential Majority.

Three telling facts.

First, the decline is in those voting, as was the case during the first Presidential round of voting. Polling groups said a record 38 percent of France's 40 million voters stayed away from polling stations. According to an opinion poll, 33 percent of French people confessed that they were more interested in the soccer clash than the results of Sunday's voting.

Second, the leftist political operatives are busy party-financing their little niches the first round, while the right had already created alliance candidates, again, a continuation of the first round of Presidential voting for the disorganized Left.

Thirdly, it ain't over, French left rallies stay-at-homes. If the center-right takes more than 400 of the 577 parliamentary seats next Sunday, it would be shocking.

If it is, I expect Bush and the RNC operatives to step up a level the rhetoric of charging the Democrats with obstructionism. Because the lesson this WH will take is what France's center-right is saying:

But voters appear keen to end five years of "cohabitation" - the awkward co-existence between Mr Chirac's right-wing presidency and a left-wing parliament and government. "The period of cohabitation, permanent political wrangling and powerlessness is finished," declared center-right Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin as, businesslike, he hit the campaign trail for the second round in the town of Limoges. "We have to act and to act we need a confident and alternative system. The Socialists governed for five years and the French people want to see something else."