The dust of France's electoral campaigns has settled and politics is back to its normal business now. New president Francois Hollande has been reminded by his former employer, the French court of auditors, that the French state needed to reduce its expenses instead of increasing them further. New ex-president Nicloas Sarkozy is facing an investigation of his shady campaign finances, just like his predecessor Chirac.
It seems like a good moment for a retrospective on the French elections that were taking place between April and June this year. After the Socialist Hollande had kicked out the Gaullist incumbent Sarkozy who was only one term in office, the Socialist Party also won the absolute majority of seats in the elections for the National Assembly. Never before has a single party achieved so much power in the V. Republic. Now the Socialists are in control of the presidency, the government, the parliament, the senate, and most regional and local governments.
From a researchers’ perspective such a huge shift in political power endorsed by popular vote is crying for explanation. Thankfully, the leading French pollsters Ipsos/Logica and TNS Sofres/Sopra published a huge amount of studies, which I like to take as solid ground for some comments and informed speculations on why this result came about.
First, the legislative elections need to be put into context. Since a constitutional reform that took effect in 2002, every President won a majority in the legislative elections that followed the presidential race. French voters don't like to see power shared by different political camps and rather stay at home if they dislike the new President instead of voting against his party. This time, abstention in the second (decisive) round of the parliamentary election achieved a record level of 44%. Hence, the explanations for the shift in political power must lie in the presidential race.
Electoral politics in France is a strange game. The illusion of a president who is capable of solving any problem mixed with a narrative of France as a victim (of immigrants, Germany, the European Union, globalisation or Anglo-Saxon liberalism) constitutes the framework in which a potentially successful candidate needs to position him- or herself. Differences in political storytelling lie in the detail. Hollande put himself back, but emphasised the “grandeur” of the French state and its salvific promise of protection and justice. Sarkozy, on the contrary, was slightly more careful on making promises based on state action, but put himself in the light of a prophet solely gifted with the ability of rescuing the “Grande Nation”.
It seems that voters favoured the former over the latter. Sarkozy started the race from a particularly bad position in the polls, while Hollande managed to keep his lead. Although Sarkozy came pretty close at the end, collecting most votes from the centrist Bayrou and the right-wing populist Le Pen, Hollande was able to save a share of 51,64% of popular vote. This made it the closest race since 1974.
Ipsos found that the majority of Hollande voters just wanted to kick Sarkozy out of office. The TNS exit poll confirmed that 53% of all voters were concerned about the candidate Sarkozy, while 45% were concerned about Hollande. 58% perceived the socialist challenger as the candidate who understands the problems of the common people, whereas only 40% attributed this closeness to the incumbent. Both surveys also indicate that around half of the voters where mainly motivated by the rejection of one candidate. To compare, in 2007 only 32% of Sarkozy voter claimed to vote for the Gaullist in order to keep the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal out of office.
Besides the personal image of the candidates, academic research reminds us to consider issue-ownership by candidates as drivers of vote choice. What concerns voters personally and what they consider important issues for France was asked in the Ipsos poll just before the second round of the presidential election. Respondents were asked to check the three most important issues out of a list of 16, separately for the national and personal level. In the figures above the bivariate associations between vote intension and issue importance is expressed in log odds ratios on the abscissa. The ordinate shows the overall importance of an issue, expressed in the share of respondents who checked the respective issue. Hence, the two plots show which issues were important to voters and how far the two candidates managed to occupy the issues.
It turns out that, for the national level, Sarkozy could drive his vote share over the macroeconomic management issues of the crisis and the deficit, while Hollande only benefited slightly from ‘his’ issues of unemployment and purchasing power. Among the issues of personal relevance, only purchasing power peaks out. Here, Hollande had a small advantage because considering purchasing power as an important issue made it slightly more likely to vote for Hollande rather than Sarkozy. The traditional partisan issues like immigration or inequality show strong associations with vote choice, but they remained on a lower level of importance.
What the analysis of issues of drivers of voting behaviour shows is that the victory of Hollande can hardly be explained by it. The contrary seems plausible, as it was Sarkozy who managed to collect votes over the key concerns. Hollande had no strong advantage in one of the most important issues. And he had only a relatively small advantage on the purchasing power issue (for both the national and personal level). It seems that the shift in political power was not based on a programmatic or ideological shift among French voters. Probably, the presidential election of this year was mainly a referendum on the personality of Sarkozy and his version of a hyper-president. Hollande and his Socialist party got lucky by a pendulum of power swinging to their side. It will be a hard task to prevent it from swinging back.
