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2022 FRENCH PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

France’s traditional parties hammered in presidential election

French politics was long dominated by the Socialist party and the Republicans - their right-wing opponents. But a desperately poor performance in the first round of the 2022 presidential election casts their future in doubt.

Published: 10 April 2022 23:01 CEST

French Socialist Party (PS) candidate Anne Hidalgo had a terrible election. Conservative Valérie Pécresse also failed to make the second round raising questions about her party's future. (Photo by Thomas COEX / AFP)

With humiliating eliminations from France’s presidential vote on Sunday, the historic rightwing Republicans party joins the Socialists in facing a moment of truth — rebuild a viable political project or risk consignment to the history books.

Republicans candidate Valerie Pecresse finished in fifth place according to projections after failing to woo back voters who turned to centrist upstart Emmanuel Macron or the far right of Marine Le Pen, who both advanced to the April 24 run-off.

The blow was all the more devastating as the Republicans party traces its roots to Charles de Gaulle, the revered World War II Resistance hero who built the foundations of the all-powerful French presidency.

“I had to fight a battle on two fronts, between the president’s party and the extremes that joined forces to divide and beat the republican right,” Pecresse said after her defeat.

“This result is obviously a personal and collective disappointment.”

Changing political landscape

With parliament elections looming in June, Republicans must now rethink their strategy and craft a conservative message in tune with voters expectations — and perhaps even drop their opposition to joining with far-right forces that have steadily gained traction in France.

“They’ve been in the opposition for 10 years now — that should have been enough time to have a programme and some strong candidates,” said Dominique Reynie of the Fondapol think-tank in Paris.

The party still has control of the Senate and of municipal councils across France, but its leaders appear unable to find a national heavyweight since Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidential defeat in 2012.

“We’re seeing a recomposition of French political life, with this new polarity between centrists and the far right,” said Gaspard Estrada, a political scientist at Sciences Po university in Paris.

“The traditional governing parties, the Socialists and Republicans, together got less than 10 percent of the votes — that speaks volumes about France’s political evolution,” he said.

Macron will be prevented from seeking re-election in 2027 under French term limits. His upstart centrist party has produced no obvious successors, meaning the jockeying has already begun to take his place.

Le Pen has said this is her last presidential campaign, but her strong showing makes it likely she will remain a powerful force to be reckoned with.

The Republicans will also have to contend with Macron’s former prime minister Edouard Philippe, whose popularity on the right has soared since taking over as mayor of Le Havre.

He has formed his own party, Horizons, and is widely expected to try to recruit more from Macron’s Republic on the Move party — a vehicle that has failed to establish any on-the-ground presence in city halls or regional councils.

Socialists adrift

The challenge is even more daunting for the leftwing Socialists, whose candidate Anne Hidalgo scored just barely two percent according to projections — below the five-percent threshold required to have campaign expenses reimbursed by the state.

“In 2017 we saw the Socialist party explode, and in this vote we’re probably going to see the explosion of the Republicans,” Remi Lefebvre, a political scientist at the University of Lille told the Grand Continent political journal.

The party’s ranks have dwindled for decades as France’s political landscape shifted to the right. More recently, leftwing voters backed Macron or embraced the revolutionary rhetoric of Jean-Luc Mélenchon — who far outpaced the Socialists with a projected score of around 21 percent.

“The left has never been able to recover the working classes…,” said Reynie.

“Instead of reinventing itself the party stuck with the bureaucratic middle classes and civil servants — It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s not enough.”

Yet neither Mélenchon nor the Greens nor the Communist candidates — all of whom trounced Hidalgo on Sunday — have shown any interest in an alliance.

“Tonight I make a solemn call for leftwing and environmental forces, on social forces, on citizens ready to commit to build together a pact for social and environmental justice for the parliament elections,” Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure said Sunday.

If the Socialists again lose parliament seats in June — they currently have just 25 — state funding for their party will fall even more, putting them in dire financial straits just years after selling their iconic Paris headquarters.

“They tried to present themselves as a social-ecological party… but without clearly laying out an original doctrine,” said Frederic Sawicki, a political scientist at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris.

“If this very bad score for the presidency is followed by a debacle in the parliament elections, the party’s survival in its current form will be in question,” he said.

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Azerbaijan vehemently rejects the accusation it bears responsibility for the riots that have led to the deaths of five people and rattled the Paris government.

But it is just the latest in a litany of tensions between Paris and Baku and not the first time France has accused Azerbaijan of being behind an alleged disinformation campaign.

The riots in New Caledonia, a French territory lying between Australia and Fiji, were sparked by moves to agree a new voting law that supporters of independence from France say discriminates against the indigenous Kanak population.

Paris points to the sudden emergence of Azerbaijani flags alongside Kanak symbols in the protests, while a group linked to the Baku authorities is openly backing separatists while condemning Paris.

“This isn’t a fantasy. It’s a reality,” interior minister Gérald Darmanin told television channel France 2 when asked if Azerbaijan, China and Russia were interfering in New Caledonia.

“I regret that some of the Caledonian pro-independence leaders have made a deal with Azerbaijan. It’s indisputable,” he alleged.

But he added: “Even if there are attempts at interference… France is sovereign on its own territory, and so much the better”.

“We completely reject the baseless accusations,” Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry spokesman Ayhan Hajizadeh said.

“We refute any connection between the leaders of the struggle for freedom in Caledonia and Azerbaijan.”

In images widely shared on social media, a reportage broadcast Wednesday on the French channel TF1 showed some pro-independence supporters wearing T-shirts adorned with the Azerbaijani flag.

Tensions between Paris and Baku have grown in the wake of the 2020 war and 2023 lightning offensive that Azerbaijan waged to regain control of its breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region from ethnic Armenian separatists.

France is a traditional ally of Christian Armenia, Azerbaijan’s neighbour and historic rival, and is also home to a large Armenian diaspora.

Darmanin said Azerbaijan – led since 2003 by President Ilham Aliyev, who succeeded his father Heydar – was a “dictatorship”.

On Wednesday, the Paris government also banned social network TikTok from operating in New Caledonia.

Tiktok, whose parent company is Chinese, has been widely used by protesters. Critics fear it is being employed to spread disinformation coming from foreign countries.

Azerbaijan invited separatists from the French territories of Martinique, French Guiana, New Caledonia and French Polynesia to Baku for a conference in July 2023.

The meeting saw the creation of the “Baku Initiative Group”, whose stated aim is to support “French liberation and anti-colonialist movements”.

The group published a statement this week condemning the French parliament’s proposed change to New Caledonia’s constitution, which would allow outsiders who moved to the territory at least 10 years ago the right to vote in its elections.

Pro-independence forces say that would dilute the vote of Kanaks, who make up about 40 percent of the population.

“We stand in solidarity with our Kanak friends and support their fair struggle,” the Baku Initiative Group said.

Raphael Glucksmann, the lawmaker heading the list for the French Socialists in June’s European Parliament elections, told Public Senat television that Azerbaijan had made “attempts to interfere… for months”.

He said the underlying problem behind the unrest was a domestic dispute over election reform, not agitation fomented by “foreign actors”.

But he accused Azerbaijan of “seizing on internal problems.”

A French government source, who asked not to be named, said pro-Azerbaijani social media accounts had on Wednesday posted an edited montage purporting to show two white police officers with rifles aimed at dead Kanaks.

“It’s a pretty massive campaign, with around 4,000 posts generated by (these) accounts,” the source told AFP.

“They are reusing techniques already used during a previous smear campaign called Olympia.”

In November, France had already accused actors linked to Azerbaijan of carrying out a disinformation campaign aimed at damaging its reputation over its ability to host the Olympic Games in Paris. Baku also rejected these accusations.