The experience of the French left in elections

Submitted by Anon on 30 September, 2001 - 11:19

In France, unlike Britain, municipal elections attract as much interest as national polls. In the municipal elections of 11 and 18 March 2001, there was a higher turnout (66% at the second round) than in Britain’s general election of June 2001; and the revolutionary left scored impressively. Lutte Ouvrière (LO) averaged 4.37% over 128 municipalities, and elected 33 municipal councillors. The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), standing in a variety of lists under titles like “100% on the left”, got 36 municipal councillors, and those lists, 91 of them, averaged 4.52%. There were 175 municipalities in total where far-left lists of candidates were presented — 44 of them have both LO and LCR-supported lists — covering about 18% of the electorate.

Other recent left election results in France have been equally, or more, impressive - 5.3% in the presidential election of 1995, and 5.2% in the Euro-elections of 1999. How were they achieved? What can we in Britain, much newer to serious electoral activity, learn from France?
France’s political system has many differences from Britain’s which make simplistic transposition of formulas from one country to another inadvisable. In France there has never been anything like the Labour Party’s near-monopoly on working-class political representation. Political party organisation generally is weaker in France than in Britain, allowing all sorts of local peculiarities and splinter-group activity. The Communist Party (CP) used to be an exception, but its once-famous discipline and monolithism has been a thing of the past since the end of the 1980s at latest.

Voting is not by Britain’s simple but minority-suppressing “first-past-the-post” system. There are complicated semi-proportional arrangements for local government elections; for a while in the 1980s there was proportional representation in parliamentary elections; and voting is generally in two rounds. The worst-scoring candidates from the first round, and those who withdraw voluntarily in order to assist better-scoring allies, are eliminated from the second, run-off, round. Communist Party and Socialist supporters can vote far-left in the first round, to register a protest, and then return to their own party in the second round.

Besides all that, ever since the great general strike of May-June 1968 the far left in France has been more widely known — reported more by the media, recognised more as an element of the political spectrum — than it is in Britain. In presidential elections it gets a good deal more media time and space than the left is ever likely to get in Britain in the foreseeable future.
The far left’s first electoral foray was to run Alain Krivine of the LCR for president in June 1969. He did badly, getting 1.05% of the vote. This proved that to run a well-known candidate associated with a popular cause does not guarantee good results. Krivine was famous from May-June 1968. Evidently, however, the vast majority of the supporters of the great general strike voted for the CP (21%), the Socialist Party (5%), or the left-Socialist PSU (3.6%).
Krivine’s campaign was very “revolutionary”, very “far-left”. No doubt that went down well with the tens of thousands of people, mostly young, with whom the LCR were immediately in contact. With the working-class millions it was different. LO, already much better implanted in the factories than the LCR was, though as yet with a much lower general public profile, supported Krivine, but reported that the workers they talked with in the factories found Krivine’s TV speeches wild or incomprehensible.
The lesson was reaffirmed in the 1974 presidential election. Krivine stood again and got only 0.36% of the vote. This time LO also stood their own candidate, Arlette Laguiller. Although she was prominent in a strike that year at the bank where she worked, Crédit Lyonnais, and she attracted some special attention by being the first woman candidate ever for president of France, Laguiller was not nearly as well known to the general public as Krivine, and her organisation, LO, was smaller and less well-known than the LCR. She won 2.35% of the poll.
Laguiller adopted a different approach from Krivine. She made no secret of being a revolutionary, but she emphatically did not make socialist revolution her election platform. Though she said where she stood on issues when asked, she did not offer a long “shopping list” of demands. Her trademark was (and is) to start all her speeches and television slots with the greeting: “Working women! Working men!” — in place of the traditional opening phrase of General De Gaulle, president from 1958 to 1969, “Frenchmen! Frenchwomen!” Why was she standing? In order to allow workers to express their class opposition to or defiance of the established parties.
Since 1974, LO has deliberately promoted Laguiller as their public spokesperson — their presidential candidate at every election, the signature on their paper’s editorial every week, the author of all their statements to the press. It is not exactly “personality politics”, however. An unflamboyant middle-aged bank clerk, Laguiller has gained her public profile as a straightforward, unpretentious voice for working-class interests and working-class politics.
Laguiller’s eventual “breakthrough”, the 5.3% she won in the 1995 presidential election, cannot be put down mainly to cumulative effort in building up her profile. There was no gradual build-up. For twenty years, from 1974 to 1994, LO’s other results were all poorer than the 2.35% of 1974. Laguiller won 2.30% in the presidential election of 1981, and 1.99% in 1988; LO’s results in other elections varied between 1.11% (legislative elections, 1981) and 2.28% (Euro-elections, 1994).
The high point in the interim was an effort at left unity, in the 1977 municipal elections. Across 56 municipalities — admittedly, only a small, and of course selected, part of the electorate — 3.78% of the vote was won by joint lists of LO, the LCR, and the OCT (a semi-demi-quasi-Maoist-cum-Trotskyist group, which was formed by a split from the LCR in 1970 and later collapsed back into the LCR). In the Euro-elections of 1979, an LO-LCR list won 3.08%.
The Union of the Left, an electoral coalition centred round the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, had been formed in 1973, and much of French politics in the 1970s revolved around whether the coalition would hold together and when and how it would oust the Gaullist right wing, who had been in power since 1958. It did so in May 1981. The Union of the Left promised a markedly more radical programme than any other mainstream-left coalition or party in Europe at that time - sweeping nationalisations, shorter working week, etc. People danced in the streets. In the legislative elections that followed the Left’s presidential victory, LO was reduced to 1.11% of the vote.
Until 1981 LO and the LCR had had a broadly similar policy for the second round of elections. Once their own candidates were put out of the race, they supported the candidates of the bigger parties with roots in and links to the organised working class, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party. In the 1980s, this changed. After legislating a few reforms in its first couple of years, the Union of the Left in government did a sharp turnabout in 1983. Its policies were soon almost indistinguishable from the Right’s. In fact, between 1986 and 1988, and again between 1993 and 1995, the Left was effectively in coalition with the Right - Mitterrand, the Left’s president, ruled in alliance with a right-wing prime minister and parliamentary majority. Since 1997, the Left’s prime minister, Lionel Jospin, has ruled in alliance with the Right’s president, Jacques Chirac.
LO responded by ceasing to support the Communist Party and the Socialist Party on the second round. The policy was less drastic than it sometimes sounds. LO did not positively call for abstention or a boycott on the second round. It indicated that it had no objection to its voters backing the CP and the SP on the second round (as most of them did), only it could not positively recommend them to. And LO’s stance was aimed more at appealing to the more hardbitten members and supporters of the CP — who detested the Union of the Left — than at preaching a general principle of not voting for reformists.
The LCR has, just this year, “caught up with” this policy, saying rather mealy-mouthedly that now it will leave its voters “free to decide for themselves” what to do on the second round. Through the 1980s and 90s, though, it emphatically advocated a CP or SP vote on the second round. This was one factor making LO-LCR unity in elections difficult for most of that time, though there were joint LO-LCR lists in the municipal elections of 1983 (2.16% of the vote).

A more important one was that, as the CP decayed and threw off dissident factions, and different Green groupings emerged, the LCR threw itself into protracted efforts to concoct some sort of new broad left-wing party out of the splinters. LO was scornful of these efforts, and in fact they produced absolutely nothing.
One major debacle was the 1988 presidential election. Pierre Juquin, a former CP leader who had recently quit the party, put his name forward and made a few left-wing speeches. The LCR rushed to support his campaign as a vehicle, so they thought, for pulling together a broad new left. In the event Juquin ran a lacklustre campaign, saying nothing notably more radical than the official CP candidate. The LCR were left as forlorn footsoldiers. The supposed “broad left” Juquin scored only 0.1% more than the avowedly Trotskyist Laguiller.

A lesson of general application, perhaps, is that a serious and patient orientation to the mass base of the traditional working-class parties should not be confused with deferential illusions in once-prominent individual leaders of those parties when they cut loose, even on a vaguely left-wing basis.

Come the 1995 presidential elections, the LCR was still wallowing in confusion. Some of its members wanted to support Laguiller. Others wanted to back the Green candidate, Dominique Voynet (a leftish talker, though since 1997 a minister in a not-very-left-at-all government). Yet others said that the LCR should advise people to vote radical-left — either Laguiller or Voynet; or even either Laguiller, or Voynet, or the CP candidate, Hue — without stating a preference within that spectrum. A few even wanted to back the Socialist Party candidate, Lionel Jospin, straight off. No one policy could command a majority, so the LCR was left with no official policy at all on polling day.

Laguiller won 5.3%, or 1.62 million votes, a score unprecedented for a revolutionary working-class candidate in Europe for many decades. Plainly the reason for this breakthrough was not left unity. (The third of the big left groups in France, the hyper-factional Parti des Travailleurs, which has had occasional electoral sallies of its own over the years — 0.39% for a presidential candidate in 1988, for example — commented only that Laguiller, in its eyes, was as bad as Chirac!)

Nor, as we have seen, was the good score due simply to a cumulative build-up of political profile. It cannot really be put down to a general rise in working-class militancy or shift of opinion to the left, either. The presidential election was won by Jacques Chirac, the candidate of the right; his main rival, the Socialist Party’s Lionel Jospin, felt no great need to “talk left”; and the total for all the left-of-Jospin candidates, Laguiller, Hue and Voynet, at 17%, was only slightly up on the 15% left-of-SP vote in 1988. The great mass-strike movement of November-December 1995 came after the presidential election, not before.

One novelty in 1995 is that Laguiller added to her bedrock message the advocacy of an “emergency plan for the workers and the unemployed”, a deliberately honed-down package of transitional demands. She called for the expropriation of profit-making enterprises which cut jobs; a stop to government subsidies to big business, an increase in tax on profits and wealth, expansion and more jobs in public services, and a general increase in wages and social benefits; and she explained all these as first measures of workers’ control over the economy.

The idea caught on, but to attribute the big rise in the far-left vote entirely to that is surely to overestimate the power of slogans. In any case, in the municipal elections later in 1995, LO, with exactly the same politics, won only 2.8% — better than in any previous municipal campaign since the joint LO-LCR-OCT effort of 1977, but much less than the presidential 5.3%.

Rising discontent among CP members — many of whom would say openly that they were voting for Laguiller, without any intention of following that up by leaving the CP and joining LO — was another factor, but again cannot be the whole of it. The CP vote, against long-term trends, went up slightly between the presidential elections of 1988 and of 1995, from 6.9% to 8.7%.

In any case, the electoral breakthrough happened — maybe due to a combination of rising working-class resentment which the established parties were slow to recognise, a further erosion of CP discipline, and a politically well-focused LO campaign. LO followed it up by raising the call for a broad new workers’ party, but in such a dour and highly-conditional way that it was almost impossible for anything to come of it. Nothing did come of it except the expulsion from LO, in early 1997, of a faction who took the “new workers’ party” call more seriously than the rest. Paradoxically, the main far-left force to gain from the general revival after 1995 was not LO, but that same LCR which had been so disoriented at the time of the presidential election.

Despite LO’s relatively disappointing score in the 1995 municipals, a joint LO-LCR list for the Euro-elections in 1999 got 5.2% of the vote, and five Euro-MPs. And, as we have seen, the municipal elections this March yielded 4.37% for LO, 4.52% for lists supported by the LCR.

The impression that the LCR outscored LO — which would be unprecedented — is, as we shall see, not quite accurate, but without doubt this is the LCR’s best-ever election result by a large margin.

In French municipal elections, it is necessary to stand a full list of candidates in each municipality in order to stand at all, though, on the semi-proportional system used, it is certain that no more than the top two or three names on any minority list have any chance of being elected. LO, therefore, in order to stand in its 128 municipalities, had to find no fewer than 5,300 candidates — in other words, many more candidates than it has members, or even organised sympathisers. LO had to canvass door-to-door, not just to win votes, but in order to find its candidates in the first place.

Less determined groupings have an obvious incentive to combine with each other to put up lists. Thus the LCR-supported lists were an enormously varied patchwork of coalitions, some led by the LCR and more or less reflecting its politics, others only having a few LCR names somewhere down a list led by people with quite other politics. At least five lists were joint lists of the LCR and the local CP. (LO has also run occasional joint lists with local CP groups in the past, though not this time.) The cumbersome titles of some others indicate the variety: in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, for example, the list was entitled: “Paris 100% on the left, for real change in Paris and in the 11th, list supported by Citizens’ Alternative, the LCR, and trade-union and campaign activists of the 11th.” Plainly a snappy signboard is not a precondition for electoral success in France... (Nor, to judge from election leaflets reproduced by LO in a special issue of its magazine dealing with the elections, is smart graphic design. LO, however, has over the years developed an effective line in posters and small stickers with short one-sentence comments — 20 words or so — rather than slogans.)

In the past such coalition-building efforts by the LCR have brought little joy, often winning smaller scores than direct candidates of the LCR itself. This time the LCR stood in its own name in 55 cantonal (smaller local-government) elections, and won an average of 3.07% — better than its previous scores, but less than the 4.52% average in the municipals, and less than LO’s average of 5.01% in the cantonals where it stood.
Over the past couple of years the LCR’s activity has refocused onto what the LCR itself can do now — with allies where appropriate rather than on vapid projections of a future new broad left party. Its leaders have shelved plans to give their organisation a new and blander name, Revolutionary Democratic Left, and the LCR has developed a more vigorous tone to its politics. That must have helped.

LO, scornful of the LCR’s coalition-building efforts in the past, has been equally scornful this time. It freely concedes that it was a first “real success on the electoral level for the LCR”. But, LO protests, “rallying together some ecologists, some anti-globalisers, some anti-neo-liberals, and a few others, and baptising them ‘objectively anti-capitalist’ even though they do not call themselves that, is perhaps easier today, but it is not the road that we want to take. The relative success of the LCR is not the success that we wish for.
“We do not consider it a political success in the sense of the building of a proletarian revolutionary party, a party which will be 100% communist and not 100% ‘on the left’... ‘left’ and ‘right’, these days, are very devalued terms, or even devoid of sense.”

Does “communist” have a clearer positive sense than “left”, after 70 years of Stalinism? We may doubt it. And we may question whether LO’s orientation to the more hardbitten core of CP activists is necessarily a better tactical choice (and tactical choice it is) than the LCR’s to different left-wing sensibilities.

LO’s bedrock argument for a positive working-class political profile, as against the LCR’s penchant for the “anti-capitalist” or “anti-neo-liberal”, does however have much to vindicate it, both in terms of basic politics and in terms of electoral results over the longer term. And its preference for a terse, honed-down class message has much to recommend it over the LCR’s bias towards filling its leaflets with a welter of good causes.

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