French and American Elections
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Although France’s upcoming presidential election now is less than three months away and the American one is still two years down the line, don’t be surprised that they’re looking more and more alike.
In both countries the presidential incumbent can’t (George W. Bush in America) or almost surely won’t (Jacques Chirac in France) be running again.
In each one, for the first time, a woman candidate, (Hillary Clinton in the United States, Ségolène Royal in France) seems to have a good chance, although not a certain one, to come out the winner.
In both countries, with multiple contenders vying for the presidential post, a new generation of politicians seems destined to take over. Sea changes of style and direction are in the offing and most of the old standby criteria for judging what the public will do at the ballot box no longer can be relied upon to forecast a result.
As in the United States, where Hillary Clinton and roughly a dozen hopefuls already have announced their candidacy for 2008, the polemics and posturing for position in France have begun far earlier than usual and changed much of the usual dynamic of a presidential race.
According to the official political and election calendar the French parliament should end its session in late February. Everyone running for election should file by March 16 a formal candidacy declaration backed up by the support signatures of at least 500 of the more than 35,000 local mayors throughout the country.
The formal campaign period—when all candidates get equal and carefully monitored television and public radio time—doesn’t begin, however, until April 9, just two weeks before the April 22 first round of voting in the country’s two-tiered election system. The two candidates with the best scores in that first round then will face off in a final vote on May 6.
Of course, as in the United States where, in the same hurry up climate, a number of states already are planning to or already have advanced their primary dates for the 2008 elections, those official campaign timetables don’t mean much.
There are well more than two dozen relatively well-known contenders and a dozen more fringe hopefuls aiming to succeed Jacques Chirac as President of the French Républic when his 12-year tenure and current five-year term in office ends formally next May 17.
And all of them—Chirac himself still is being coy about whether he will try for a third term but is accorded little chance—have been campaigning in one way or another for months.
In addition to competing for those qualifying signatures from mayors—and not all have obtained them yet—those running have been giving virtually non-stop television, radio newspaper and magazine interviews and offering up blizzards of proposals about how they will go about changing the country for the better if the voters will only put them in office.
The bookies, the media and the political pundits already have made two of them—Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy on the right and Socialist party candidate Royal on the left of the political spectrum—far and away the neck and neck favorites to wind up as finalists on May 6.
The fact that such campaigning is at high pitch so early in the game has surprised and often dismayed French political communication specialists, who keep saying that all the current electoral sound and fury doesn’t meant much. It’s the last two weeks before the elections that will be the determining factor, they insist.
What rarely is mentioned, however, given all the focus on the various presidential candidates, is the fact that virtually immediately after the choice gets made on May 6, legislative elections will follow quickly on June 16 and 17. That’s when members of a new National Assembly (Like the American House of Representatives) and a third of the members of a new Senate will be chosen.
In real-life politics those elections will have enormous influence on how much leeway the new French leader will have to accomplish what all candidates proclaim will be sweeping reforms they want to make in the way France is run.
Such promises traditionally are made by all the candidates in all France’s elections. And later those who made them always produce a reason why so few were kept,
Jacques Chirac, the current President of the Republic is renowned for just such backtracking. It’s always the world economic situation and thus the nation’s economic growth that didn’t live up to expectations. Various emergencies had put a strain on the budget. The out-of-power political opposition had blocked promising attempts to get things done. The bad baggage left over from previous administrations and in need of repair had to be attended to first.
What has captured the public imagination about Sarkozy and Royal this time is the fact that both are members of a new, much younger wave of French politicians. Both are campaigning in tradition-breaking fashion and both promise radical departures from the old and stodgy ways of doing things in a country undergoing a crisis of confidence in the ‘French model” social system that it’s politicians have touted, despite increasing economic and other evidence to the contrary, as the best in the world.
That has a particular appeal to potential voters because politicians in France are widely noted for holding on to office for 20 or 30 years and being more likely to resist than initiate reforms.
French voters cast their ballots by name for a president. But for their parliamentary representatives they vote for a prioritised list of candidates representing the party of their choice, The percentage of voting results for that party then determine what percentage of that list, running down from the top, are considered elected.
Normally, if a candidate wins the presidential vote by a convincing margin, the legislative elections will reflect that popular will to give a newly elected president and his or her party the backing to get their programs enacted.
But if the results provide only a hairline victory, say 51 percent to 49 percent for one or the other, the legislative elections might follow the same path. A new president then could face a lot of divisive or crippling parliamentary votes that diminish his or her legislative prerogatives
That kind of power split is common in the United States and In France this year it can’t be excluded. It has happened before. Chirac knows that well. Although he was elected to the presidency as a candidate from the right of the political spectrum, he was forced to share power in an uneasy “cohabitation” with Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin for five years from 1997-2002 because Jospin’s party had a majority in the legislature.
In a similar but opposite situation he already had shared it as a right-of-center Prime Minister with then Socialist President François Mitterrand from 1974 to 1976 when, frustrated by the inability to cooperate with Mitterrand, he resigned in frustration.
French voters also historically have an unpredictable streak.
Jospin, for instance, although considered a certain finalist at the time, was unexpectedly knocked out of the Presidential sweepstakes in the first-tier vote during the elections of 2002.
And not quite two years ago, the French voted down the project for a new European constitution despite support for the project by the main political parties on both sides of the political divide and polling results unanimously predicting approval,
To all that has to be added the tendency of French unions to cause chaos in the country by ordering their followers out on strike whenever proposed government actions look like they might trim down what in France are known as their members’ avantages acquis, “acquired advantages,
With all those variables in the air, predictions about any contender’s chances are very dicey. It’s going to be a long race. A lot of unexpected twists and turns and perhaps missteps lie ahead for all the candidates and the political experts may well be right.
It’s the final weeks before the vote that will be decisive.