The 2012 French Election

The question is often asked to what extent voting choices are made on the basis of issues and to what extent they are made on the basis of the candidates’ personalities, the party supported or the general impression transmitted by the campaign. As Nicolas Sauger underlines, ‘since the 1970s “issue voting” has been proved to exist in most of the major European countries’. However, ‘this is not necessarily the case in France’. In 2012, after a campaign dominated by the economic crisis and characterized by strong electoral volatility, the question might well be looked at differently. How might it be answered from the perspective of the strategist rather than the political scientist? How might it be answered by drawing on both the quantitative (individual interviews carried out during each wave among volatile voters) and the qualitative elements (voting intentions, concerns and motivations) provided by the ten waves of the Présidoscopie, How might it be answered by distinguishing between what is actually known and what can merely be supposed about this presidential election?

The French presidential election is more intensely personalized than any other election in the country. This is undoubtedly why turnout is always higher than for any other election. Commented on through opinion polls that provide information throughout the campaign, the race between the candidates is passionately followed by French voters and all the more so when the final result is uncertain. Academic debate surrounding the personalization of politics and, more broadly speaking, the question of how voters feel about candidates has been around for a long time. During the 2007 election campaign, the qualities attributed to the candidates by voters fueled media coverage and contributed to the final scores obtained by the candidates on polling day. The media controversy surrounding Ségolène Royal’s perceived competence or lack of same provides a good example of this. Nicolas Sarkozy’s controversial personality also fueled a great deal of debate. During the campaign, a number of qualities and flaws were attributed to the main candidates which little by little contributed to the building of their public image. Analyses carried out on public opinion showed that these images differed palpably from one candidate to another and that they were influenced by campaign events. A given act carried out in public, a statement made or an attitude expressed shaped the candidates’ image either positively or negatively depending on how the public interpreted it.

Electoral campaigns represent very particular moments in politics. They celebrate the cardinal principle that lies at the heart of every democratic society: the organization of communal life where all members of the greater group are represented by a small group of citizens who govern in their name. During an electoral period, democracy itself takes center stage amidst a multitude of rituals and ceremonies. Voters are constantly greeted with the outward signs of democracy in action: posters, tracts, town hall meetings and rallies, discussions and debate.

The presidential election is clearly the French electorate’s favorite. In 2012, the strong level of electoral mobilization beginning with the first round broke the cycle of record abstention levels in all the intermediary elections that took place during Nicolas Sarkozy’s five years in power with eight out of ten voters (81.5%) casting a vote. The percentage is a little lower than in 2007 (–2.2 points) but significantly higher than in the first round in 2002 when only 71.6% of voters turned out—a record abstention level for a presidential election. Nonetheless, the strong turnout in 2012 was lower than in 1965 (84.7%) and 1974 (84.2%). However, it was a little higher than the average level of turnout (80.3%) for the eight first rounds of presidential elections held to date under the Fifth Republic. In the second round, abstention dropped by 1.5% but the level of turnout remained two points lower than in the 2007 second round (82% and 84% respectively) and much lower than the record level reached in the second round of the 1974 presidential election (87.3%). During the two presidential elections won by François Mitterrand in 1981 and 1988, a very high percentage of French voters went to the polls—86.8% and 85%, respectively.

Throughout the nine waves of the 2012 French electoral panel, constant exchanges between the virtual electorates of various left-wing candidates were observed. When the Présidoscopie was set up at the beginning of November 2011, the balance of power between the candidates was naturally unclear. Following the successful open primary (primaires citoyennes) undertaken for the first time in France by the Parti Socialiste, Hollande was center stage. At that point, the potential of the ecology candidate, Eva Joly, and the Front de Gauche candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was more difficult to evaluate as was the credibility of extreme left candidates. Nor was it yet possible at that stage to know how many of the potential candidates would become official candidates in the presidential election. The first panel wave was used to characterize the profiles of voters who made a choice several months before the election. These outlines were drawn from the outset, making it possible to observe how many voters would change their minds, how many would remain loyal and how many would turn to or abandon the left-wing candidates, for what reason, in what context and at what moment during the campaign.

When analyzing the electoral decision-making process, voters who cross left/right (L/R) boundaries are a source of particular interest, raising questions about the meaning of the vote, its ideological and partisan structure and its coherence over time. Along with other volatile trajectories (within left or right camps and including centrists and abstainers), they give voice to the same hesitation and a structural indetermination that are characteristic of political volatility among voters today. The very fact that they have abandoned the bipolar order separating the left and right confers an added dimension of interest to them.

For several months leading up to the 2012 presidential election, it was unclear how many centrist candidates would stand. While it appeared certain that François Bayrou would run, as he had in 2002 and 2007, rumors circulated about other potential candidates, particularly those on the center right. Jean-Louis Borloo, President of the Parti Radical, was the first to drop out of the race in October 2011, followed in February 2012 by Hervé Morin of the Nouveau Center party, then Dominique de Villepin, who may well have attracted some centrist voters. Finally, Corinne Lepage, a moderate Ecologist who had run under the MoDem banner in 2002 and 2007, also stepped down, having failed to obtain the 500 signatures of elected representatives which every candidate for the presidency needs.

The decision on who to vote for was presented as a standing decision in electoral sociology literature for a long time. The literature of electoral sociology has tended to represent individual voting behavior as relatively static over time. V.O. Key Jr, Franck Munger and Walter Dean Burnham all stressed that voting choices tended to be stable over long periods, rooted as they were in lasting and durable choices. However, this idea has been increasingly called into question with the acknowledgement of electoral volatility and the taking into account of short-term factors such as campaigns, candidate image, issues and so on. All of these have an impact on voting decisions, leading to a certain level of instability in voting intentions during a given campaign and from one campaign to another.

The notion of an issue encompasses the idea of a question, a theme or a preoccupation that is being discussed either implicitly or explicitly during an electoral campaign. It supposes a cleavage, with one section of the electorate focusing on an issue such as unemployment while another is more concerned with issues of security. An election campaign gives rise to a battle of political agendas with each candidate determining the issues around which the competition will be fought. Unemployment will be a more important issue for a left-wing candidate and security for a right-wing candidate. Within electoral debate, cleavages can also appear around a single issue that gives rise to different and even contradictory interpretations and conclusions depending on the candidate involved. The issue of unemployment provides a good illustration of this. The prevailing political climate also defines the issues, at times giving a particular theme a hegemonic character. For example, during the 2002 presidential electoral campaign, security was a key election issue.

Rarely has the result of a presidential election been so expected, predicted and finally announced as was the case in 2012. Sarkozy’s defeat seemed very likely a long time before it actually occurred. Three factors contributed to this. First, the classic difficulty for an outgoing president to seek another mandate (except at the end of a period of cohabitation) without shortcomings in the assessment of his time in office immediately being referred to, particularly during a time of crisis. Second, Sarkozy’s personal unpopularity was a major factor during his five-year mandate and on the eve of the election, it was at a height. Finally, he was isolated politically as was illustrated by the fact that between the two rounds none of the eight eliminated candidates lent their support to him. Le Pen announced her preference for a blank vote or abstention and Bayrou made his choice of Hollande public just two days before the election.

The 2012 presidential election mobilized voters in huge numbers. However, it did not inspire a sense of optimism for the future in the same way the 2007 election that brought Nicolas Sarkozy to power had done. Together with the need to curb public spending, the financial and economic crisis lowered the expectations of French voters. Furthermore, Hollande did not benefit from the ‘honeymoon period’ that usually follows the election of a new president. According to the SOFRES survey carried out two and a half weeks after the election on May 24 and 25, 2012, just 55% of people said they had confidence in the newly elected president with 37% saying they did not have confidence in him. After ten years of right-wing government, it came as some surprise that the election of only the second socialist president of the Fifth Republic did not generate more enthusiasm. As a reminder, 74% of voters had confidence in François Mitterrand after his election in 1981; 64% in Jacques Chirac in 1995; and 63% in Nicolas Sarkozy in the immediate 2007 post-electoral period.

When questioned almost 100 days after Hollande’s election, between August 6 and 8, 57% of respondents believed that the new president had honored the promises he had made during the campaign. This was a very positive result for the first stage of his presidency, especially in comparison with the frequently disillusioned opinion, French voters have of promises made by a politician. Roughly 92% of Hollande’s first-round voters held this opinion as did 81% of Mélenchon’s electorate and 68% of Bayrou’s. After almost 100 days in power, neither disappointment nor a feeling that campaign promises had not been honored had emerged among Hollande’s electorate or among those who rallied to him in the second round.

The majority of chapters in this book have shown how François Hollande’s electoral victory was part of the logic of a normal election as defined by Philip Converse. The normal vote was reinforced by the ‘normality’ card that Hollande played in his struggle to defeat the outgoing president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who was seen to be excessive and deemed guilty of all the flaws inherent to a hyper-presidency and a campaign that was marked by a clear shift to the right. However, once Hollande took over and the former president had disappeared—temporarily—from the political scene, Hollande was left alone with his electoral promises and the difficult task of governing within the framework of a presidential regime where the majority of responsibilities must be assumed by the President of the Republic himself. As Jérôme Fourquet has shown, he lost popularity very quickly and as early as September 2012 the number of those dissatisfied with the ‘normal President’ (56% of dissatisfied compared to 43% of satisfied), who had so recently been elected, exceeded the number of those who were satisfied. His decline in popularity continued to deepen throughout the years 2013 and 2014, eventually beating all records in September, October and November of that year. At that point, just 13 to 14% of those polled were satisfied with his performance as president (the IFOP Journal du Dimanche popularity indicator). Never before had a French president of the Fifth Republic been so unpopular. No president had ever gone under the threshold of 20%. This exceptionally low level of popularity was linked both to disappointment with the manner in which Hollande exercised presidential power as he seemed to lack gravitas, and the vision that many of his predecessors had. Added to this, the massive reinforcement of fiscal measures very rapidly alienated right-wing and center voters, along with the middle classes in general. Working-class voters and those on the extreme left were disappointed by the relatively meek social–liberal reformism undertaken by the new president. His unpopularity has been forcefully expressed at the polls, giving rise to a series of severe electoral defeats for the left: the March 2014 municipal elections when the left lost 121 towns of over 15,000 inhabitants, the May 2014 European elections where the Parti Socialiste lists obtained less than 14% of votes cast, the loss of the Senate in favor of the right in September 2014, the March 2015 départemental elections at the end of which the left retained power in just 30 of the hundred plus départements in the country. In March 2014, attempting to halt the political decline, Hollande sacked his Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, and replaced him with a young prime minister, Manuel Valls. Valls came from the reformist, social–liberal, strict republican minority within the Parti Socialiste. His choice of Valls led to the Ecologists refusing to take part in the new government and, as early as August 2014, the resignation of the more left-wing socialist ministers. (Arnaud Montebourg, Benoît Hamon). Such a major shrinking of the majority who had won in 2012 and the emergence of a group of socialist deputies known as ‘frondeurs’ (rebels), who contested the government’s economic and social policy, made the exercise of power very difficult and caused Hollande’s unpopularity to spiral downwards rapidly. The young prime minister, Manuel Valls, who was better able to hold his own seemed, to the left as a whole, to be the only politician capable of saving the French left from a veritable shipwreck. For now, all the surveys of voting intentions for the 2017 presidential election show that Hollande will not make it through to the second round as he is in third position behind the Front National’s Marine Le Pen and the Republican candidates (Nicolas Sarkozy or Alain Juppé).