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French parliamentary elections – when do they happen and why are they important?

No sooner has the dust settled from the presidential elections, then France is back into campaigning mode for the parliamentary elections. Here's what happens and why they are important.

French parliamentary elections - when do they happen and why are they important?
There's more voting to come in France in the parliamentary elections in June. Photo by SIMON WOLFHART/STR / AFP

When?

Parliamentary elections take place in June. Like the presidential elections they take place over two rounds, but this time there is just a week between the two rounds – on June 12th and 19th.

Candidates have until May 20th to file nomination papers with the préfecture and then the campaign officially begins on May 30th.

What?

The parliamentary elections are to vote for députés, roughly equivalent of MPs in the UK, who represent a geographical area and who sit in the Assemblée nationale, the lower house of the French parliament.

There are 577 députés, each representing a geographical area of about 125,000 inhabitants. Constituencies, known as circonscriptions in French, are therefore generally considerably smaller than départements.

The députés have a mandate of five years, and the entire assembly is up for re-election every five years.

There are also députés who represent French citizens living overseas and they have their own ‘constituencies’ which basically divide the world into areas – northern Europe, southern Europe, Americas etc.

How does the voting system work?

Unsurprisingly, there’s quite a complex system for voting.

In the first round on June 12th, voters can pick anyone on the ballot paper.

If one candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, they are elected and there is no need for a second round.

If no-one scores higher than 50 percent there is a second round. Unlike in the presidential election, there can be more than two candidates in the second round – the two highest scoring candidates go through plus anyone who has achieved more than 12.5 percent of the vote.

Voters then go back to the polling station on June 19th and vote again, and this time the person with the highest score is elected. 

Then what happens?

When the vote is over each député is confirmed as representing a particular area, and they are considered responsible for looking out for the interests of their constituents, campaigning on local issues etc.

They are also issued with their official tricolour sashes, which they wear on formal occasions. 

Why are these elections important?

Because the députés form party-based voting blocks in the parliament.

The president is elected separately in a direct-vote system, but once in power still needs the support of the Assemblée nationale in order to get any laws passed.

At present Macron’s La République en Marche party is the biggest block in the parliament, and by forming an alliance with two other parties has commanded a large majority which has enabled Macron to pass legislation relatively easily over the past five years.

This could change in June. 

If a president’s party doesn’t have a majority in the Assemblée nationale, they can try to form an alliance with other parties in order to create a block that will, mostly, vote in favour of the government’s reforms.

If this is impossible then a cohabitation is created. This means that the leader of the largest block in the parliament offers to serve as Prime Minister to the president – even if they are members of opposing parties.

It’s far from an ideal situation for the president, but it means that they at least have a voting majority in the parliament, even if they will almost certainly be forced to make some policy concessions in exchange for the support of their prime minister.

This happened to leftwinger François Mitterand, who was forced to appoint Jacques Chirac as his prime minister after a crushing defeat in parliamentary elections. Chirac went on to be elected president, only to be forced to appoint the leftwing Lionel Jospin as his prime minister when he too was unable to get a majority in the parliamentary elections.

In both cases, however, the defeats at parliamentary level came several years after they won the presidency, the system has since been changed so that both presidential and parliamentary elections are on a five-year cycle.

What is the rate of turn out like?

Voter turn-out for the parliamentary elections in France is far lower than for the presidential election.

In 2017 for example only 42.6 percent of voters cast a ballot in the second round of the parliamentary elections, well below the 74 percent who voted in the second round of the presidential election.

Will they ever introduce proportional representation in parliamentary elections?

There has been increasing pressure in recent years to reform the parliamentary elections system to introduce proportional representation or at least an element of it.

Parties like Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally, formerly National Front) favour it because it would in theory give them a greater share of MPs in parliament and therefor more influence.

Political analysts have long claimed the electoral system and lack of representation for fringe groups is one of the reasons that has lead to high abstention rates in elections as well as unrest on the streets such as the Gilets Jaunes crisis.

In 2017 Macron had promised to introduce PR but then the government failed to go through with it. Perhaps memories are still fresh of when France did introduce it to the parliamentary elections back in 1986. This led to the election of 35 National Front MPs which caused uproar among traditional left and right parties. The policy was then ditched in 1988 – just two years later.

Those who argue against it says it hampers the government’s ability to put in place reforms and leads to a blockage in which a president can get little done.

A proposed solution is to have an element of PR introduced but not for all 577 deputies to be elected using the system. Whether this reform ever happens or not, only time will tell.

What about the Senate?

All new laws in France go before both the Assemblée nationale and the Sénat, but if after several readings the two houses cannot agree, the Assemblée nationale has the final say.

The Senate is currently dominated by the centre-right Les Républicains party, and the next Senate elections are not until 2023. 

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JOHN LICHFIELD

OPINION: When the mask slips, Le Pen’s party reveals its fundamental racism

The French far-right party's new leader is smooth, handsome and plausible - writes John Lichfield - but when the mask slips we see that the party's fundamental ideology remains deeply racist.

OPINION: When the mask slips, Le Pen's party reveals its fundamental racism

The talented Monsieur Bardella wishes you well.

He wishes the poor well and he wishes the wealthy well. He wishes the old well and he wishes the young well. He wishes the Right well and he wishes the Left well.

His programme is partly populist Left, partly populist Right and now, bizarrely, includes several ideas copy-pasted from Macronism (formerly known as the blood-sucking elite).

Bardella is like a politician invented by AI: plausible to the point of being unctuous; all things to all people (except the brown or black ones); gently brutal-looking; programmed with information and disinformation that he can seamlessly access (unlike Marine Le Pen).

Is he possibly a robot?

Bardella’ performance in the first TV debate of this cursed election was impressive.

But the mask did slip a couple of times.

He accidentally admitted that the Rassemblement National’s alternative to the Macron pension reform – headline “retirement at 60 (for some)” –  would mean many some other people retiring at 66 or 67. Whoops.

Bardella’s face at that moment was like that of a 12-year-old caught cheating at cards. Maybe, he is not a robot after all.

The Prime ministerial candidate of the Far Right Rassemblement National also refused to give any credit to the contribution to French life made by immigrants and the sons and daughters of immigrants.

Not the footballers, not the nurses, not the doctors, not the cleaners, not the scientists. Not even his Italian grandparents nor his Algerian great grand-parent.

The PM Gabriel Attal tried to push him on this point; so did the Left wing representative Manuel Bompard (not a man I like but a spokesman who defended his camp well).

Bardella refused to say a good word in favour of brown or black French people. He refused to acknowledge the ideological – and fundamentally – racist basis for the RN’s plans to exclude “dual nationals” from some senior government jobs.

Explained: the far-right’s plan to ban dual-nationals from certain jobs 

In practise that will means marginalising Franco-Algerians or Franco-Moroccans, not Franco-Germans or Franco-Luxembourgers. There is no practical justification for this policy. It is a way of signalling that, if the RN came to power, the single, indivisible French Republic will end. There will be the white French people and there will be the rest.

Already, the prospect of the Far Right winning a majority in parliament over the next two weekends has produced a minor explosion of racist remarks in social media and on the street.   

Are all the 33-35 percent of French voters prepared to vote for Bardella and Le Pen racists? No, of course, they are not.

But race – and an exaggerated sense of threat to French identity – are an important part of this extraordinary mud-slide of support for the Far Right in the opinion polls.

READ ALSO: What is ‘national preference’ and how would it hurt foreigners in France?

There is also something else at work which is near-hysterical and difficult to combat. In the minds of many French voters, the Far Right has become the “antidote to Macronism”, the opposite to Emmanuel Macron and therefore “a good thing”.

It is as if many French people – including many who should know better including the editors of Le Figaro – have turned a blind eye to the history of Lepennism and much of its present.

Anything said to point out the residual racism of the RN and the anti-European charlatanry of its economic programme  reinforces, rather than weakens their choice. Bardella and Le Pen are the opposite of all that has gone before. Bring it on.

This is partly Emmanuel Macron’s fault. He promised to be a revolutionary and different kind of politician. He turned out to be another mainstream reformer. He made no effort to build a grassroots, political  movement. He is given no credit for his successes (lower unemployment, cleaner air). He has become hated beyond all logic or reason but that, itself, is a calamitous failure for a politician.

By sweeping away what remained of the failed centre-right in and centre-left in 2017 Macron created a new political duality of Centre v  Far Right. This served him well electorally through two presidential elections.

But the French are a people devoted to regular “alternance” ie detesting and frequently booting out their leaders. For many previously moderate voters, the only gut-satisfying alternative to the irrationally detested centre is now a cosmetically softened Far Right.

This is an absurd and unhealthy situation which will do France no good and could cause much permanent harm. Will the Far Right win a majority on July 7th?

The opinion polls suggest not. But they are drifting gradually in Bardella’s direction.

In June 2016, the UK took careful aim and shot itself in the foot. I fear that France may be about to shoot itself in the heart and the head.

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