France's Electoral Systems

Full Transcript:

Introduction: 

Hello, and welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast, where it is my job to discuss and analyze democratic institutions. 

The two-round presidential elections in France back in April created lots of discussions in the media and widespread concerns that a right-wing candidate, Marine Le Pen would rise to power. Yet, Emmanuel Macron prevailed in the second round with 58% of the vote. Very soon, on June 12th and 19th, voters in France are going to the polls to elect 577 members of the National Assembly. 

With Emiliano Grossman I discuss the electoral systems used in the French democracy, both for the presidential and legislative elections. We dive into the historical roots of the Fifth Republic that introduced many of these institutions in 1958 and how they evolved over time. Emiliano explains how they affect representation, the political party landscape and parties’ strategies to win votes. It was an instructive and insightful conversation in which Emiliano shares his opinions based on 20 years of political research.

Emiliano Grossman is an Associate Professor at Centre d’études européennes et de politique comparée at Sciences Po, in Paris since 2012. He got his PhD from Sciences Po, and completed his habilitation from Sciences Po Grenoble in 2014. He has published numerous articles in top academic journals on comparative political institutions and agenda-setting processes. His latest book is titled “Do Elections (Still) Matter? Mandates, Institutions, and Policies in Western Europe”

Please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Emiliano Grossman.

Interview:

Stephan Kyburz: Emiliano Grossman, welcome to the Rules of the Game Podcast. I’m very happy to have you on the show. 

Emiliano Grossman: Thank you for having me.

Stephan Kyburz: So my first question, as always, is what is your first memory of democracy?

Emiliano Grossman: I thought about that. I was actually born in Argentina and I grew up in Germany so I assume that my first memory of democracy is the contrast to autocracy. So my parents were exiles from Argentine dictatorship in the 1970’s and I remember being afraid of Argentina, like in my 3 or 4 year old mind, like of being scared of what could happen to us in a non-democratic country, so it was more the contrast between a democratic and a non-democratic country that I remember still very vividly.

Stephan Kyburz: Okay, that’s very interesting and also I realized that many of my guests actually, on the podcast, have some memory of a time when there was not democracy yet or it was like a time of political uprising or dictatorship as well. So today I’d like to talk about the French electoral institutions. Obviously now there was the French presidential election and then we have the legislative elections in June coming up. So I think it’s a good time to talk about these electoral systems and how they affect French politics. So the French presidential elections have created quite a lot of discussion in 2017 but also now – probably also because Marine Le Pen was quite a strong contender and a lot of people were afraid that quite a right-wing, radical right-wing person would become very powerful in France. So can you tell a bit about the French presidential election system? And maybe what are its characteristics? And also what is your opinion of it?

Emiliano Grossman: Okay, maybe some historical detail on this. So the Fifth Republic basically responds to an institutional crisis that comes along with the Algerian civil war, Algerian war basically, which is a decolonization war which starts in 1956 and is more or less resolved in 1958. So in ‘58 in the situation of almost civil war in France, in metropolitan France, the assembly called General Charles de Gaulle that had been retired from politics and gave them, more or less, in a step of probably unconstitutional behavior, gives him plenary powers to redraw a new constitution. So there had been a conflict on that back in 1946 where he had already exposed his ideas of a more presidential system and had lost. There had been a referendum on that and his project had been rejected by a majority. So here in this situation of crisis he comes back, he creates an entirely different constitution which gives a much more central place to the president and he has more or less a blank check, basically, to write that constitution. As a matter of fact in the original version of the constitution adopted in October of 1958 there is no direct election of the president. So that will actually be introduced in another problematic step from a constitutional point of view through a referendum that is in  principle not designed to change the constitution. In 1962 he will introduce the direct election of the president. It will take place for the first time in 1965. So the electoral system is very peculiar. Well, it’s this two-round system that now exists in a couple of countries but France has always been special because basically it provides you with the idea that you can pick your favorite candidate in the first round and then you settle for one of the two candidates that arrived first in the second round. So basically with the idea that there are 2 different logics. There’s been a couple of works on that, especially on developing countries, discouraging those countries from using that because this creates a strong uncertainty between the first and the second round and the possibility for possible losers to disconnect or to make some kind of dissidents from the electoral system. So France is not today not a fragile democracy but it’s true that for young democracies this has been an issue. I remember there’s a paper on this by Cindy Skach which I think is pretty good on that point. But basically – so the whole system (now just a couple of words on what the system actually does) so the system basically forces you to very different behavior in the first round and the second round, and that I think is very problematic. In the first round you basically have to win over your camp. Sso basically this tends to increase more radical statements or more provocative statements, while on the second round you have to reunite people. Because you have to win people over from other parties and this creates some kind of schizophrenia which I think is very very problematic. And another second effect of this, which I think is very problematic, is that in order to win this election you have to present yourself as somebody who’s gonna save the country, like you have to be some kind of providential figure, and that’s very much also, I think this is not just an institutional feature, it’s also some of the legacy of General de Gaulle who was this kind of providential figure. He saved France several times from civil war and dictatorship and so on and so forth but the problem is that this creates a lot of expectations on behalf of the candidates. So the candidates tend to exaggerate what they can actually do but you have to do that because otherwise you will lose against the other candidates who are also exaggerating. Now the problem with this system is that once you are in power, you’re back in the real world and in the real world there is interdependence, there is veto points, There is other things going on and that creates a huge amount of frustration and deception and that’s basically one of the permanent figures of french political institutions in general, which I think are mostly created by this electoral system which is basically, you have trusted so much this newly elected president that once he is in power you realize that he’s just a mortal figure you get very, very disappointed and you see that in popularity curves in France. They usually get very, very high at the beginning of the mandate and within a matter of six months most of this positive capital disappears and actually continues degrading till the next election. So we wrote a book on that in 2017 with my colleague Nicolas Sauger which is called “Why we hate our politicians so much?” a reference to Colin Hay’s book on the U.K. And it’s true that we find this. There is a permanent figure so we hoped that Macron would kind of stop this because he was ah he was a little special with regard to the French history, to the extent that he doesn’t belong to the classical left and right camps. But in the end his popularity growths  look very much like those of everybody else and so we’ll see what happens.I think we’ll talk about the legislative elections in a minute.

Stephan Kyburz: Cool. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on that. So the politicians really need to make strong statements, in the first round especially, to stand out against the others and then kind of reunite in the second round. But when you compare that system it seems to me – In Switzerland, for example, we also use, actually, that two-round majoritarian election system in some, for some offices, obviously not for such an important office. So do you think, compared to the American plurality system, what’s your opinion on these 2 systems then?

Emiliano Grossman: Well, the thing is I think the US has a similar functioning, as a matter of fact, to the primaries. So the primaries I would compare them to our first round, where candidates usually have to convince the radical fringes of your electorate and and therefore, especially in the republican party, that’s always been very, very impressive where you try to appeal to the far right in the first round and then you do something much more moderate in the second round, letting apart for the time being Donald Trump. But it’s true that in the end these two systems have a similar functioning. The problem is that in our case we try to introduce, France tried to introduce primaries in the past few years and this has created an additional amount of uncertainty, actually, in the system. So basically pushing candidates to be ever more provocative, ever more ambitious in their public statements. So that’s very peculiar. Now one word about the 2022 election though, which is worth mentioning, because in principle what we would have historically, the first time that a far-right candidate made into the second round was in 2002 and one of the reasons that was advanced by many observers, at the time, was that there was too much fragmentation of the vote in the first round. So basically everybody could vote for anyone who wanted and even though we had a very popular incumbent prime minister, the socialist Lionel Jospin, he actually came in third for a couple of thousand votes behind Jean-Marie Le Penn because there were 3 or 4 different left-wing candidates that split the vote across the left wing electorate. The left didn’t have, even though the left was probably majoritarian at the time, they didn’t have anyone in the second round. So that was one of the consequences. Now 2022 was very different. So 20 years apart. Actually what happened, we had a similar, I think we had the same number of candidates then back in 2002, twelve candidates, but what happened in the past few weeks, in the last few weeks before the first round was that actually people already in the first round turned towards a more strategic vote.So rather than picking their favorite candidate what they did was basically seeing, towards the end of the ah the the electoral process it was clear that – We have 3 poles in France now. We have a centrist pole, the far-right pole and the left-wing pole. And it’s true that within each of those poles people would move towards the most promising candidate.Each of them increased their share by four, five percent over the last two weeks or something, which is really impressive and unheard of. And I think we may be actually witnessing a change of logic in the very functioning of this two-round system due to cultural or political evolution.

Stephan Kyburz: So to make sure that one of the candidates,  either from the left or the right or the center, makes it to the second round, right? 

Emiliano Grossman: Yeah, absolutely.

Stephan Kyburz: So what I think is interesting also, compared to the American system, for example. France seems to have a lot of changes in political parties. There is new movements coming up, like the movement from Emanuel Macron, that he founded only in 2016 and then there is others. That’s actually interesting that there is still – I mean I’m used to saying that majoritarian systems, they prefer the old, bigger parties or they conserve power. But in France this doesn’t really seem to be the case right?

Emiliano Grossman: So honestly, generally speaking, I would say my general answer… I don’t have a good explanation for your question but, generally speaking, I observe that there is greater volatility everywhere. So France is not not an exception. I remember back in the early 2000’s when we would speak about the fact that eastern european party systems are volatile and that western european party systems are consolidated. I think nobody would say that again anymore. So even in countries, take the U.K. for instance, where your assumption still kind of works, because we have two historical parties that still dominate the show, Labor and the Conservatives, but that would probably be a very short version of what actually happened over the past twenty years. So they’re with UKIP with Nigel Farage and so on and so forth, which basically created real danger and volatility in the political system and a lot of tensions and polarization. So even the most, apparently the most stable systems are subject to very, very high levels of volatility. Look at Germany, which is not exactly a majoritarian system but long considered as a very stable system, where you have increasing fragmentation. So with an increasing number of parties, more and more difficult government negotiations and this, basically I think, applies for most countries. So I wouldn’t put France very much apart. Where France is different, I agree with you, is that France has this turnover in party organizations. So the right, basically the conservatives create a new party every 10 years more or less. So we long had the RPR created by Chirac in the 1970’s, that was replaced by UMP in the early 2000’s and by The Republicans at the end of the 2010’s. So this is not exactly always the same circumference, so It doesn’t cover exactly the same political figures or movements and so on and so forth. On the left this used to be more stable but it’s true that here we’re clearly witnessing a wholesale change, and we still don’t know where it is headed.  So there is a lot of uncertainty, because this new Popular Union of Ecological and Social Popular Movements, the way they call the left-wing alliance, I’m not entirely sure that’s ever going to be a party, maybe that’s just in electoral lines and then they will reorganize as parties once they’re after the election, but what is true is that the Socialist Party has all but disappeared and this election will probably just confirm that. And that’s one of the big figures of the last fifty years of French politics and it’s been replaced by a left-wing movement. I would refrain from calling it a far-left movement, to be honest, La France Insoumise, simply because when you look at the 1980’s programs from the Socialist Party, they’re very much, very similar to what Mélenchon is saying today. It is true that we’ve moved more towards pro-market positions everywhere, but his program doesn’t even mention much nationalizations or stuff that were very, very popular back in the 1980’s in the Socialist program. And then you have the Greens. You still have a tiny share of Communists, and a tiny share of Socialists. So the real tension, I think, will be between the Greens and the social part, like the environmental and the social part in the program and that’s clearly something that is very challenging, and much will depend on how different leaders will situate themselves within the next assembly and within the political dynamics as they will start unfolding after June.

Stephan Kyburz: That’s also probably, from the European perspective right? This party fragmentation. This has kind of happened in all different countries. And it’s probably also a reflection of more pronounced interests or also the kind of broadening of political interests, of polarization but still also more dynamics, again in political parties that I think we see across Europe. So another aspect that is important to mention is obviously the semi-presidential nature of government in France and this will also then lead us to the legislative elections. Maybe can you say something about the specifics of the semi-presidential systems? What’s the role of the prime minister? And how does that link to the legislator?

Emiliano Grossman: The semi-presidential system – my late friend Robert Elgie,  who used to be a professor at a Dublin College University, used to say that actually the one thing that determines, like the only way of actually determining objectively what a semi-presidential system is, is that you have a separately elected president and a prime minister.  So that’s basically the baseline definition. But starting from that you have very, very different semi-presidential systems. Out of the 27 current EU members, actually 12 have semi-presidential systems. The problem is that nobody has ever heard about the Portuguese or the Finnish or the Slovak presidents, right? So they are directly elected presidents but they usually are figurehat presidents which play a rather secondary role. France from that point of view is different and there’s only a few other countries that have undergone, among the European countries, that have undergone similar experiences. There was Poland for a period before 1999 and Romania had a period where the president was more proactive. So in France what that means is that basically you have 2 entirely different elections. And for a long time they were entirely different elections. I’ll come back to that in a minute. But so with rather different dynamics, but with a certain preeminence for the president. What that actually means is when you have, like in 2017 the two elections coming one after the other, so the first the presidential election then under those circumstances the legislative election, usually will work as some kind of third round of the presidential election, so basically just confirming the presidential election. That did not used to be the case. Before 2002 the terms were different. So you had a seven year presidential term and a five year legislative term, so that would necessarily create some dephasing, because you would have at some point legislative elections in the middle of the presidential term and those elections were usually very, very dangerous for the president and on three occasions this created our own national brand of  divided government, which we call cohabitation. So the last one was 1997. That was very interesting because Jacques Chirac had been elected in 1995. He had a very large legislative majority that had been elected in 1993 but he called for new elections one year ahead of the end of the term because he has that power in 1997. Because there were a couple of european negotiations going on and as a consequence, in particular the what was called the Nice Treaty. Well, as a consequence of that they called for those early actions which he eventually lost. Being confronted for five of the seven years of this mandate with a hostile prime-minister. So what happens under this situation is really that the president becomes more like a secondary figure like he can be in Portugal, Slovakia or Finland and the prime-minister becomes the effective chief executive. So the president still has a couple of powers under those circumstances, especially with regard to the army and defense and foreign policy. Because on defense, very simply he’s the one who holds nuclear power, so that’s not a minor thing, and the constitution mentions a couple of things with regard to foreign policy and his power to also approve international treaties and so on and so forth. But this very much depends on the effective relationship between the two. So the 2 presidents that lived through this were François Mitterrand twice and Jacques Chirac once. And it’s true that both times there were quite a bit of tensions but de facto president basically stops being involved in everyday politics when that happens. So the reform of 2002, that came into force in 2002, was supposed to put an end to this by creating two identical terms, those two 5 year terms. And now the presidential election takes place a couple of weeks, six weeks before the second round takes place, six weeks before the first round of the legislative election, with a hope that we would never have again this divided government, because divided government has very bad reputation, for reasons that I never quite understood, because I don’t think it’s such a bad thing, but in France, a little bit like in the US actually too, divided government is always supposed to create a lot of problems and stalemate and so on and so forth, which is not really true that the empirical literature does not show that this is what happens. But definitely the idea was that people would not change their mind within six weeks, and that from now on we would have a united government more or less forever. So that’s why that’s where this year’s election becomes really interesting because things are not as clear cut this time as they were in the 3 or 4 past elections. 

Stephan Kyburz: Okay, and there hasn’t been so many cases yet since the reform in that way. But would you say, so far, that the reform did what it was supposed to do, that is, kind of unify government in a way?

Emiliano Grossman: It did, but at the same time I think I was never a big fan of that to be honest, so from a purely institutional point of view, because it creates a president who’s not directly responsible to parliament who’s the effective head of government, so the prime minister can be voted out of office but the the president is kind of removed from parliament, so it is the prime minister who defends the president’s policies in parliament. But there is no way to talk to the president directly. So I find that it creates a kind of much stronger system than the American presidential system because it creates a presidentialist presidential system. That I think is from a democratic point of view somewhat problematic because there is no clear accountability. You have to wait for the next presidential election to actually criticize the government because the prime minister is actually some kind of secretary of the president and that’s it. And this is very visible, for instance, in the second prime minister that Macron chose, Jean Castex, is just a higher civil servant with no political history. So he has no political capital of his own, so he’s really a puppet in the hands of the president. At least Édouard Philippe, who was a figure of the conservative party, had some legitimacy of his own. He’s the mayor of Le Havre, which is one of the bigger cities on the west coast, so there clearly is the temptation of the president to actually pick some kind of figurehead prime minister. So we’re turning this entirely around, with what I was saying earlier, for Portugal or Finland, where you have a figurehead president. So here we have a figurehead prime minister, with a president actually governing without being effectively accountable to parliament.

Stephan Kyburz: And the prime minister is more an agent of the president rather than of parliament, but still the president, when he or she picks the prime minister, needs to really take into account the majorities in parliament, right?

Emiliano Grossman: Yes, but here we come to the legislative elections, actually. So the legislative elections have a system similar to the one in usel for the presidential election but there is some tiny but very important differences. So the thing is that for the legislative electoral system, there is no limit of the number of candidates who make it into the second round. So there’s 577 districts. It’s a two round majoritarian system and those who qualify for the second round are those candidates who get more than 12.5% of the registered voters. Now this is a very big figure when you think about it, especially when turnout is low. Like let’s say when turnout is 50% that means that you need 25% of the vote which is huge. So why is this important? Because basically what happens, provided that you have the presidential election first and that the presidential election basically concentrates all the political attention, usually what happens in those six weeks between the second round and the first round of the legislative election is that the winners stay mobilized while the losers demobilize. So usually what you have is a much lower turnout at the legislative elections under those circumstances than for the presidential election. So this year the presidential election turnout wasn’t amazing. It was one of the lowest, but it’s still around 70%. In 2017 there was a 20% drop in turnout between the presidential election and the parliamentary election. For the first time in recorded history there was a turnout of less than 50% for the legislative elections. So what that does is that basically it creates a huge premium for the winner because the demobilization is much weaker for the winner than it is for everyone else. So I basically twittered a little bit about this in the past few weeks and I had a response from one candidate of the La France Insoumise, Mélenchon’s party, who told me that he lost 66% between the first round of the presidential election and the first round of the legislative election of the vote because basically he was a candidate in Dijon, so he lost 66% of the number of votes, and so didn’t make it into the second round as a consequence. And this is a real issue. I think that creates a huge bonus for the president because what happened in 2017 is that Emmanuel Macron, with a new party and mostly unknown candidates, obtained a very large absolute majority of seats. So more than 400 seats out of the 577, so he was free to govern as he pleased, provided that most of his candidates were not real professional politicians, there was very little resistance and as a consequence he governed as if parliament didn’t exist. So even though you’re right, that in principle it’s parliament that determines the majority, in 2017 Emmanuel Macron was able to do as if his presidential majority was enough to govern, which I agree was a little exceptional. So this is not how it usually happens.

Stephan Kyburz: So essentially the president, he was almost able to save the results from the presidential elections over to the legislative elections. 

Emiliano Grossman: Absolutely.

Stephan Kyburz: But it was still not possible for the older parties, for the more traditional parties to defend, really, these seats. That’s also still quite surprising, right?

Emiliano Grossman: It’s always been a little bit surprising to me. I think that’s much more a cultural than a political issue. So what happens is that once you lose the presidential election, the losers also demobilize, not just their electorates. So they do much less campaigning and much less mobilization, much less meetings and so on and so forth than the winners. And that’s an interesting thing because there is no reason to do that. So you could perfectly well say, like in 2017 Macon won against Marine Le Pen, the left could have said, well now let’s campaign to win the legislative elections but nobody did that. And de facto, Jean-Luc Mélenchon back in 2017 was a little bit bitter about his defeat because he had done a good campaign, exceptionally good campaign, nobody expected him to be that high and then he kind of disappeared. And his party hardly campaigned and the same actually for Marine Le Pen. So they actually both got very, very weak results in the subsequent legislative election. So this is where the difference takes place, this year. With regard to 2017, Jean-Luc Mélenchon provided that this year the election was much more open than it was in 2017. He immediately came out of the woods saying, elect me prime minister, which is a kind of an abuse of terms because the prime minister is not a direct election. But it was a way, definitely, to make that election more interesting and we know that participation is usually higher when there is a bigger stake and very clearly this he has managed to convince people that there is a stake, this time, and that Macron’s victory at the legislative elections should not be taken for granted. So there is clearly some mobilization going on. And it’s true that for the time being, the only thing we talk about in the political debate is the left-wing alliance, which is really interesting because they came in third in the presidential election and yet it is them who are buzzing currently in the media. So that’s very interesting.

Stephan Kyburz: So 2017 it was almost like all the losing parties were completely disappointed and almost disappeared so it was like a freeway for Macron and this was probably a mistake from their perspective. 

Emiliano Grossman: Absolutely.

Stephan Kyburz: Because they also lost power in that game. And now they’re almost trying to force themselves into cohabitation, maybe? Or to really have a step in the door, right?

Emiliano Grossman: Well, that’s exactly what they’re hoping for. It’s still unlikely. But it’s true that, provided that they manage to unite the four main left-wing parties, the Communists, the Greens, La France insoumise and the Socialists, they definitely have a strong possibility to reach this 12.5% mark in the first round, in a very large number of constituencies. So I calculated that for fun and basically they could be present in the second round of more than 420 constituencies, which would put them in a very interesting position. We have three poles, much will depend on what the machronists will do in those constituencies where Le Pen’s party comes first. And provided that many of the members of Macron’s party are former socialists, there could be some additional vote reserves for the left-wing coalition. So I think it looks really interesting. What I’m definitely convinced at this stage – I’m not convinced that they can win it, that they can create or force a new cohabitation. But what I’m pretty convinced is that they will be the second most important force in parliament, provided that Marine Le Pen, on her side, has not managed to create a union of the far-right, because there were two far-right forces in the presidential election, but they appeal to rather different electorates and they’ve been very hostile to each other. So I assume that Rassemblement National, Marine Le Pen’s party will not do much better than in 2017. So as a consequence I expect the left-wing alliance to be the main opposition to Macron, if not more. So I’m not excluding the possibility of a new divided government. It’s just very unlikely

Stephan Kyburz: That’s very interesting. Also it will force Macron to consider more of a compromise, I guess, with the different forces. 

Emiliano Grossman: Well, that’s his big challenge right now. So I think what he understood very clearly is that – Macron did a very strange campaign. So he hardly campaigned, really. I think as the president who had mastered the yellow vests, the pandemic and who had been playing a major role in the Ukraine crisis, I assumed that he properly hoped that this would be enough to win re-election. He realized two weeks before the first round that this might not be enough right? So that the others were closing in and that there was a lot of opposition coming in, and so he started at the very end of the campaign he started doing some campaigning. But in the end he was a little nonchalant, to use a French word. And it’s true that right now he’s paying the price for that because he never quite developed his party. So the party has no real identity, it’s not very clear who those people are; it didn’t grow together as a political movement. It’s not very clear what Macron’s convictions are on many central issues. So what we know from Macron is that he’s a pro-market and pro-liberalization candidate and that he feels very strongly about that. But we also know that he’s very flexible on some of the other issues. And I think there are, at least, three issues which have become very, very important in this election and where he will have to take clear stenses in the weeks to come. The first is the institutional issue. There is a lot of discussion going on this electoral system that we’ve been talking about. And every single…

Stephan Kyburz: In the legislative…?

Emiliano Grossman: The legislative elections. And every single candidate, I think, this time was favoring… Every one of the 12 candidates, I think, was favoring a reform. Maybe not the conservatives but everyone else was favoring a more proportional electoral system. Macron already back in 2017 had promised to enact at least some share of proportional vote and to change the electoral system in that direction. So his excuse is that he couldn’t do it given the pandemic, given all the things that happened, and maybe that’s true. I’m not disputing that. But what is very clear is that the three main candidates have a proportional electoral system very high on their priority list. So Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and so there is apparently a consensus in favor of that. The problem is that this has been promised by every single president since the 1980’s and never been implemented, once they were in power, because that’s the problem with this fifth republic is that everybody agrees that this presidential function is much too powerful, but once you have it, and you are the one who has that power, why would you give it away? 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, yeah, the typical pattern.

Emiliano Grossman: The typical pattern. So that’s clearly an issue here. I think this time things look a little bit better because first, Macron knows that he has limited legitimacy. So he only beat Marine Le Pen by less than 20%, which is not an impressive result against the far right candidate, in the second round. He knows that he’s not standing for re-election. And his party did not really take roots. I’m not entirely sure what will remain of this after the end of this mandate. So from that point of view, I think that the conditions, the context is probably favorable to a reform of the electoral system. The two other issues that people are waiting for him: one is the environment, something that he’s been very vocal about but not very active, and he has announced that he will name the prime minister, weirdly in charge of environmental planification, whatever that means. And it’s true that the left-wing alliance has put that very high up in their priority list. And that’s clearly something where, especially young voters, are very, very demanding. And it’s true that young voters, who massively voted for Macron in 2017, massively deserted Macron this time. So Macron only made it to the second round thanks to the vote of people of 65 and above. That’s very interesting. And the third issue, I think, which is the one that Macron is least at ease about, is issues of inequality and social justice. Which is also something where younger voters feel very strongly about, but not just younger voters, it’s also people… There’s also this yellow vest dimension on this, which is very, very much of a rural / urban divide, so Marine Le Pen is the rural president, she won in most rural areas. Jean-Luc Mélenchon is very good in the cities and Macron did a little bit okay in both and overall better than the two others. But it’s true that this dimension is very, very important. And those are, I think, the three issues. The electoral reform, environment and social justice are the 3 issues on which Macron has to say something if he wants to be credible at the legislative elections in June.

Stephan Kyburz: That’s super interesting and also I will look forward to finding these topics in his addresses. So one thing is that in 1985 there was already a reform for proportional representation for the national assembly. But this didn’t hold. So it was removed or reversed after the 1986 election. So the coalition for reform was really not that stable right?

Emiliano Grossman: Absolutely.

Stephan Kyburz: Why was that?

Emiliano Grossman: Well, what happened basically is that it gave a big share to the Front National, to the far-right party and it’s true that the conservatives were always in favor of the classical two-round system and they probably still are.

Stephan Kyburz: Because he preserved power for a long time right.

Emiliano Grossman: Exactly. So I think nowadays we’re moving away from this. First, the conservative party, which is probably still the main defender of the system, is weakened. So the conservative candidate Valérie Pécresse has made less than 5% in the first round of the presidential election. So the party is also financially weakened because there is a rule according to which your campaign expenses are not reimbursed if you get less than 5%, so she actually paid a lot of her money out of her own pocket and now has a five or six million euro debt, personal debt. So she’s calling for more donations to make up for that. But here there is clearly – this is the main force against it. And I think they’re today not important enough to actually prevent that. So back in 1986 they won and they had promised from the very start that they would revert that reform immediately after coming to power and then nobody touched that ever again. So that’s clearly what happened back then. I think the situation today is very different. I think there is a large share of the French electorate that considers that it’s not normal that the second party in France, the Rassemblement National, only has 3 MPs. So how can you possibly have 3 MPs with 20% of the vote. So that’s clearly something which I think is politically less acceptable today. And if we have to do with the greater share of the far-right representatives then so be it. I think that’s what a large share of public opinion thinks, but also a large share of the political personnel considers that it’s probably better for those people to be actually visible, commit mistakes, pay the price for those mistakes and so on and so forth, rather than imagining that you can go away with the problem just by not seeing it. And I think that there is some evolution in political discourse on those issues that makes the situation more favorable. And it’s true that all the other forces are also more in favor of a more proportional government. I find interestingly, the one party that could have been more opposed to it is Mélenchon’s party because Mélenchon’s party has a very concentrated territorial presence. So they have a couple of strongholds where they do extremely well. So mostly in the northern suburbs of Paris, some of the Paris neighborhoods in the northeast of Paris and then in the overseas departments and a couple of other suburbs of other big cities, like Leon and Toulouse and a couple of other places like that. It’s true that they are not the ones that are most favored by the system but they have, for probably ideological reasons, have been favoring a proportional electoral system more than anyone else for the past few years. So we’ll see what happens. I think there is a real opportunity this time. I’ve never quite believed that this would ever happen. This time I’m kind of more optimistic that there might be some change going on.

Stephan Kyburz: And this could clearly restabilize the party system as well, right? Because I feel like the two-round majoritarian system also favors movements that rise, but then, also they ebb right? So for Macron, for example, that hasn’t really a strong party institutionalization. For him it was really beneficial like, in 2017, when there was almost another revolution but this social movement that suddenly was really strong and he won a lot of seats. But then once that dynamic is gone, then it’s also a loss for such movements. 

Emiliano Grossman: Actually you can calculate that. It’s the most disproportional system there is. It’s more disproportional than the U.K. system which is terribly disproportional. And unlike the U.K system… In the Uk system it’s very simple. You basically have some kind of natural threshold which is around 35%. It changes a little bit from one election to the next. But if you reach more or less 35% you get a 15% premium and you get 50% of the seats. That’s more less it. So for instance between 2010 and 2015, the conservative party only won 200.000 votes, but that was enough to shift from a coalition government, the first coalition government in U.K. history and an absolute majority of seats going back to the normal situation, in the U.K. Here it’s completely unforeseeable. It’s really, really messy. So because the vote is very dispersed in the first round and then much depends on which negotiations will take place between the two rounds and how many triangulars there are. Triangular means when more than two candidates are qualified for the second round. So this creates a lot of uncertainty and I agree with you that probably moving to a proportional system would create more predictability and more stability. As a matter of fact, that’s an interesting thing. France is a country where you do tons of polling, and it’s true that is something that is criticized a lot, but we hardly ever do polling on legislative elections because they are so unforeseeable. There is no point in making them. So in Germany you have, what they call the sonntagsfrage, the Sunday question which is basically who would you vote for if there were elections on sunday, and you do that for parliament, obviously because that’s the only election, and you have a pretty nice idea about where the parties stand over time. In France we have no idea because we have to wait for the presidential election to know where the party stands. And there is so the only thing we poll, really, is the president and not the parliament, because the parliament is so unpredictable. So I agree with you that moving to a proportional system would make the whole thing a little bit more predictable and it would also probably change the logic of the fifth Republic, because fundamentally it would mean that, whoever the president is, he will have to build a majority, rather than hoping that his presidential bonus will give him that majority. And that would clearly be a very fundamental change in the dynamic of the fifth republic and that would probably force the parties also to depolarize political debate, it would probably force the parties to get used to talking to each other more, negotiate with each other more, because historically Maurice Duverger, who theorized the semi-presidential system, basically considered that this kind of Electoral system (so he also wrote on electoral systems) that the two-round majoritarian electoral system creates two-camp logic. This is not quite true anymore. What we have is, because even within those two camps, we have very aggressive behavior on behalf of each candidate because this presidential election forces you to distinguish you very radically from everyone else. So I think even if we keep the presidential election, which is something that some of the candidates want to change, even if we keep the presidential election but we introduce the proportional system this would create some kind of counterweight. So maybe having even a feedback effect on the presidential election, because you can’t possibly insult your opponents if you have to negotiate coalitions with them in six weeks time. So I think that it will be an interesting experiment. Whatever happens, it will be a very interesting experiment.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, for sure. And also it might raise new questions about the system. But in terms of proportional representation I clearly see that what is concerned like right-wing, radical right-wing parties, that there is also more predictability, because across Europe we’ve seen that their potential to win, like large shares of the vote, is quite limited. Especially once they also gain some power in parliament.

Emiliano Grossman: It means however accepting that like, for instance, in Denmark they become maybe the single most important party in parliament. So that’s maybe something that some people still refrain from accepting but personally I think this is much more preferable to the situation that we have.

Stephan Kyburz: So I still have so many questions. But I think we’ll leave it at that for the moment. But do you have any books or articles that you could recommend on these topics?

Emiliano Grossman: Well I mentioned this paper by Cindy Skach which I think is interesting. This is an old paper. I can find you the reference but basically on the change of French political institutions there have been quite a few publications. The thing is most of them are not in are not in english so I’m afraid that most of those criticisms are not clearly available on that. More generally speaking on the effects of the electoral system, I think that I mostly refer to the classics. What we know from electoral systems has been studied by people like Gary Cox and Duverger and I think those classics remain the single most important references. On semi-presidential systems I still think that the work of Robert Elgie is probably the one I prefer. And there’s one paper, it’s by Matthew Sugart, and he basically makes this distinction between, what he calls, the premier presidentialist semi-presidential system and the parliamentary prime ministerial system. So basically pointing to that difference that I make between France, Poland between 93 and 99 and Romania at some point and all the other semi-presidential systems where the president has a more secondary role. I think the best example of this is probably Ireland where you have a president who’s very little autonomous. And there have been times when there’s only been one candidate, because there was a partisan consensus on who that candidate should be, but it’s, clearly, the role of that president is comparable to that of the Queen of England. No political position taking, ever. Even less than what you would find in some parliamentary systems like Italy where the president still, sometimes, plays a role, especially in periods of political turmoil. But France is clearly on the premier presidential side of this and that’s what makes it interesting. And I think this paper probably remains till the present day the best paper published on this specific issue.

Stephan Kyburz: I´ll definitely link to that and also, of course, I will link to your research, your website and we’ll probably see still a lot of discussions coming up on these semi-presidentidential systems. Also recently I had Steffen Ganghof on my podcast on semi-parliamentarism, which I thought was really an interesting discussion. But I think for now we leave it at that. Also we haven’t talked about the senate, the French senate yet, which also would be, of course, another big discussion. But I think we’ll leave that for a later moment.

Emiliano Grossman: Perfect. 

Stephan Kyburz: And for now Emiliano, thank you very much for taking time. It has been super interesting. I’ve learned a lot about the French system, actually. And hopefully we’ll have a chance to chat again. 

Emiliano Grossman: Okay, thank you very much Stephan, talk to you soon.

Stephan Kyburz: Thank you, thanks a lot.