The presidential election, then the legislative ones (yesterday and next Sunday) in France highlight the shortcomings and the dangers of representative democracy in the 21ste century.
What is, it is often asked, the legitimacy of a political party which has obtained a quarter of the votes in the first round — which is the true measure of support for a candidate or a party — if, in addition, more than half of registered voters (about 51% yesterday) did not bother to vote?
This is the case of the two formations that arrived in the lead and neck and neck in the first round yesterday: the presidential party Together! and the left united behind Jean-Luc Mélenchon under the acronym NUPES. In concrete terms, this means that both have obtained the support of one-eighth of the registered voters.
This fact – with the almost perfect equality of the two scores – did not prevent the leader of insubordinate France from speaking of an adversary “beaten and defeated”, while the left would have the wind in the sails and that it will “surge” in the second round… Magical thinking and political discourse.
There is the distortion of the first-past-the-post vote. There is the fragmentation of society and its representation. And there is the cry of rage from a good part of the population who vote “against” and no longer manage to come together, in a positive way, around any project whatsoever.
The two-round system, extended in France to legislative elections (but with, for the second round, the bizarre rule of “12.5% of registered voters”), was supposed to solve this problem by creating consensus, clarity and the legitimacy.
If this was ever true in the past… it is no longer true today.
Emmanuel Macron, apparently re-elected “hands down” on April 24 (with 59% of the votes cast and 43% of those registered), suffers from all these trends combined.
His score in the second round in the presidential election, very honorable if we only look at the figures, does not reflect his true membership support (28% in the first round…a figure that fell yesterday to 26% for his party). Many of the people who supported him in the second round voted “against” Marine Le Pen… not “for” him.
This vote of spite was accompanied, in the heart of many voters, by a rage against the person for whom they were voting by default.
No, that really wasn’t the idea of the French two-round system!
Let us add that the distortion between deputies and percentage of votes, well known in the first-past-the-post system (where we have already seen majorities with 36% of the votes – in Canada, in the United Kingdom), can be equal, or even worse, with two towers.
In 2017, Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche (LREM) party won 28% of the vote in the first round… and won 54% of the seats alone in the second round! And again, he was below the projections which, at the time, had predicted him up to two-thirds of the deputies.
With this system, a political landscape with three very clear poles (a liberal center with 26-28%, a predominantly radical left with roughly speaking the same score, plus an ultranationalist right at 23% – National Rally + Reconquest), which leaves the traditional right at 12-14% on the sidelines…, this system only has room, today, for the first two.
The camp that came second in the presidential election (ultranationalist right, Le Pen + Zemmour = 30%) was completely dropped in the legislative elections. Ironically, the “revolutionary” Mélenchon, who wants to change the electoral system (and many other things in France), takes full advantage of these distortions of the old system. This allows one camp – which, let’s not forget, has a ceiling of 30% in public opinion – to play for victory today!
This is why this great and old democracy, founder of the modern nation, embodies so well the distance that has grown over the years between the people and their political representation.
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]