After France’s recent municipal elections, the dominant narrative was that the Front National, an extreme right-wing party, gained amid discontent with the ruling Socialists. Reading the media coverage, I assumed that the Front National must have swept through Paris as well. Yet they didn’t win any of the races in the French capital.
The Front National’s leader, Marine Le Pen, has been trying to soften (or, as the French say, “de-demonize”) the party’s image ever since she inherited control from her father, Jean-Marie. Still, though, the party wants to restrict immigration, opposes gay marriage, and has raised the possibility of exiting the European Union.
Front National leader Marine Le Pen has worked to expand the party’s base, perhaps by luring Socialists. (Credit: Flickr user Blandine Le Cain, CC)
Going into the municipal elections, held in two rounds on March 23 and 30, the Front National targeted municipalities with vulnerable incumbents — and ended up capturing about a dozen. The Front National took roughly 5% of the first-round vote, even though it had put forward a candidate for just 600 of approximately 36,000 towns, according to The Guardian. As of the first round, the Front National estimated having won 472 council positions nationwide, with another 315 up for grabs in the second round, Bloomberg reported.
In a March 29 interview with Le Monde, the French daily, Le Pen said the following, rather cryptically:
“Excuse me, but it’s where we’re appearing that the Socialists are disappearing.”
That quote led me to wonder what’s behind the Front National’s gains:
Are they due to the behavior of typical Socialist voters? Or has the Front National lured supporters of the center-right UMP party? Basically, what caused the Front National’s bump in this election process?
First I turned to the electoral results database kept by the BFM network. I searched for the towns with at least 10,000 inhabitants where the Front National claimed the mayorship. There were 12 such municipalities that I pinpointed, with the help of this interactive map (screenshot below):
Credit: BFM TV
Looking at the data for each town, I found some support for Le Pen’s claim that the Front National was taking positions directly from the Socialists. Half of the dozen towns that swung to the Front National had a Socialist mayor previously. And in four of them — mostly those in the industrial northeast — a majority of voters sided with François Hollande in the 2012 presidential election, helping him triumph.
How could the Front National prevail so abruptly in what had been left-leaning areas? Two explanations come to mind:
Either it’s because Socialist voters sat out this municipal election, frustrated by the options at hand. (The national abstention rate in the second round was a record high of 38.5%.)
Another reason might be that some voters actively cast ballots for the Front National, but as a protest gesture. Irrational as that sounds, the two-round system in France lets someone pick a Front National candidate initially, then switch away if he or she gets enough of the vote to advance. That candidate just can’t win outright — something the mass protest might cause accidentally.
What about the Front National’s showing in Paris? Their total in the first round was on par with the rest of France’s, somewhere close to six percent. But unlike in Marseilles, whose 7th district the Front National snatched up, the party didn’t succeed anywhere in Paris. Not even one of its nominees made it to a second-round showdown.
Given all the buzz about the Front National’s rising popularity, I wasn’t convinced that they flopped outright in Paris. So I wanted to pinpoint where they did best. To conduct that sort of analysis, I downloaded the results from the city’s open data initiative, sorted them by the Front National candidates, and calculated each of their first-round hauls. I ended up plugging in data for all 869 of the polling stations distributed over Paris’s 20 arrondissements. What I found is that the Front National’s results varied substantially by polling station.
This interactive map shows the percentage of first-round votes for the Front National — at the most local scale possible.
You’ll notice a pattern to their base of support: it falls mostly around the edges of Paris, the so-called périphérique that’s home to many immigrants and poor residents. This puzzled me at first: How could the extreme right earn so much backing in the very spots where immigrants are the most represented? (Not that they’re necessarily able or inclined to vote in French elections.)
For some context as to why the Front National scored in these disadvantaged areas, I spoke with Madani Cheurfa. He’s an analyst with the Cevipof election research lab, run by the elite French university Sciences Po. Below you can listen to his insights, in French:
Especially for those of you who can’t understand French, here are the key points Cheurfa made during our talk:
** The Front National used to rely on courting the bourgeois voters located near the city center. Recently, though, the party has shifted to mobilizing the hard-hit population where the “tramway” runs, just by the boulevard that encircles the city. Those voters are likely to feel disillusioned with the current Socialist leadership, Cheurfa explained, and the Front National has capitalized on that.
** Voter participation in Paris was fairly low this election cycle, relative to France at large as well as the 2001 and 2008 levels.
** This municipal election, for Cheurfa, was a “confirmation” of the geographic peculiarity in Paris. The western half tends to vote for the right; the eastern half, for the left. What’s more, the 12th and 14th arrondissements are the “swing” ones, he said, that usually determine the selection of Paris’s mayors.
** Finally, it’s true that the Front National doubled their first-round share in Paris, compared to 2008. But as Cheurfa noted, they’re starting from quite a low place. He gave the statistic that 6.2 percent of Paris’s voters opted for Marine Le Pen in her 2012 presidential bid. That’s just 0.06 percent less than the Front National’s Paris total in this most recent election.
After I took in Cheurfa’s observations about the geography and voter logic behind the Front National’s results in Paris, I paid a visit to its 20th arrondissement. That’s where Jean-Marie Le Pen served as a city deputy back in the 1980s, Cheurfa informed me. It’s also where the Front National just registered some of its best outcomes, namely four of its top 10 polling stations (by percent of the vote). Those polling stations saw nearly 20 percent for the Front National, although the district as a whole kept to the single digits.
So I leave you to this narrated slideshow about my journey to the city limits.
Selling France 