Abstract
The uniqueness of the 2017 elections emerged from a system which appeared ‘blocked’ in a pattern of executive alternation between the governing parties of the left and right. The parallels between Hollande incumbency and that of Sarkozy in the previous electoral cycle suggested that competition in 2017 would follow a very similar pattern to 2012. Looking at the French party system over the longer term, however, reveals that a combination of certain traits witnessed before in separate elections, but never simultaneously—a strong centrist challenge, strong polarization and medium levels of party/candidate fragmentation—provided the essential conditions for the overturning of this blocked structure.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
TNS-SOFRES political popularity trends, http://www.tns-sofres.com/cotes-de-popularites.
- 3.
‘Un nouveau sondage illustre la dynamique Marine Le Pen’, http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2011/03/05/un-nouveau-sondage-illustre-la-dynamique-marine-le-pen_1489056_823448.html.
- 4.
In some instances, the electoral accordion has been invoked between legislative and presidential elections, for example, in 2002 where the fragmentation of candidates in the presidential race was replaced by a concentration of parties in the legislatives (Martin and Salomon 2004).
- 5.
We use ‘extreme’ in the sense of Sartori’s anti-system parties, namely parties which represent a challenge to the existing political order, and which reject coalition and are rejected by their nearest moderate neighbour (Sartori 1976: 123–133) LFI’s coalition potential from the moderate neighbour is perhaps debatable, given Hamon’s (rejected) offer of a pact with Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
- 6.
TNS-Kantar political popularity trends, http://www.tns-sofres.com/dataviz?type=2&code_nom=bayrou.
- 7.
For this reason, we do not consider the 1995 candidacy of the RPR’s Edouard Balladur, supported by the UDF, as in any way centrist—Balladur was a ‘classic’ candidate of the social conservative right, splitting the right-wing vote between himself and Jacques Chirac.
- 8.
We refer here to the standard measure of the effective number of parties (ENP) proposed by Laakso and Taagepera (1979), which takes into account both the number of parties and their relative weights. In this book, the ENP is also used for the effective number of candidates in primary and presidential elections. As Taagepera and Shugart (1989) suggest, the ‘effective number of parties’ index should not be used as a proxy for the actual number of competitors, as it primarily conveys information about fragmentation.
- 9.
See Michael Gallagher on this—(https://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/staff/michael_gallagher/ElSystems/Docts/effno.php).
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Evans, J., Ivaldi, G. (2018). The 2017 Presidential Election: Continuity and Change. In: The 2017 French Presidential Elections. French Politics, Society and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68327-0_2
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