The Nature of Party Politics in France

Abstract

This chapter is the first of two which are concerned with the aspects of French politics that are most immediately and obviously visible to the observer, whether that observer is French, or an outsider. It is in the act of voting that citizens in democratic countries are most conscious of their role as individuals in political life. France has for most of the period since the war had a high rate of participation in voting, despite the multiplicity of types of election — for local councils at commune, département and since 1986 regional level, for the National Assembly, the European Parliament, and the Presidency and, from time to time, in referenda. It has been said that French political life exists in a state of permanent campaigning, and indeed there seem to be few months when an election is neither forthcoming, and the subject of debate and campaigning, nor just completed and hence the subject of analysis and associated triumph and recrimination. In this respect the early 1990s was highly unusual, for there were no elections in 1990 or 1991.