The French electoral system is in agony, according to the foreign press. And that would be good news, because for Unherd “France has the worst electoral system in the world”. The British site puts forward several arguments. First, between the legislative and presidential elections, “the French vote four times to have a new government.”
“And if that weren’t enough to put everyone in a bad mood, this system encourages on top of the market a deleterious practice, that of tactical voting.”
In fact, the first-past-the-post system in two rounds of the presidential election allows only two candidates to qualify for the second round, “and supporters of all the other teams are left to choose which of the two finalists they most want to go out on.” Same method of voting in the legislative elections, with rules of representativeness bordering on the arithmetic battle.
Lack of representativeness
The French electoral system is therefore not at all representative, says the German newspaper The mirror, looking at the 2017 legislative elections. The figures show that “the distribution of seats in the National Assembly differs considerably from the results of the first round: the party of Marine Le Pen, which at the time was called the National Front (FN), had won 13.2% of the votes in the first round but had obtained only 8 deputies, that is to say a little more than 1% of the seats.”
In reality, it was Emmanuel Macron who had benefited the most from the voting method: with 28.2% of the votes in the first round, he had obtained 308 of the 577 seats in the Assembly, or more than 50%.
result, while “the white far right has [en France] his greatest party” – and that a Le Pen has been in the second round of three of the last five presidential elections –, “in the French Parliament, the ancient practice of the republican front confined the nationalists to the margins, explain it Telegraph. This contrast had everything of a distorting mirror.”
broken dam
At least, until last Sunday. On June 19, the RN went from 8 to 89 seats in the National Assembly, becoming the first opposition party in number of deputies.
For the Telegraphin Westminster (where the UK Parliament sits) such a reversal would be next to impossible. “This is one of the great virtues of our current electoral system [scrutin uninominal majoritaire à un tour] : without preventing the breakthroughs of the minority parties, it raises in front of them reasonably high obstacles.”
In France, it is the republican front which “barred the way” to the extremes. Until “deluge of votes and seats” of this year, which, for The newspaper, is linked to Emmanuel Macron’s strategy.
“The president was very good at channeling moderate discontent among socialists and Republicans in his first term by directing their votes to his party at the center.”
However, its success had weakened the French political tradition and the historic parties of the moderate right and left. This year’s vote therefore only confirms “the state of decay of an electoral system which has long shown its difficulties in surviving”.
With massive abstention and incessant demonstrations, “the last stage of the decomposition of the party system and opposition to the central state and the Élysée is over”, concludes the Courier.