About French Regional Elections

Alexander Plahr, Vice-President du Lymec, m'a demandé d'écrire une petite contribution pour expliquer aux libéraux européens le vote des régionales. Voici ma proposition. 

Last Sunday, French citizens voted for the first ballot of the regional elections. As expected, a large majority of people refrained from voting. The abstention rate grew from 39.16% in 2004 to 53.5% in 2010, resulting in a total number of only 19.475.713 voters. If the abstention rate is the first striking fact of this election, the fact that Jean-Marie Lepen’s party came back as a major political force with a score of 11,42% is for sure the second one. Then, the almost done deal for the united socialist forces in next week-end second ballot is definitely the third one. They represent 53.72%, adding voters from the Socialist Party (23,6%) together with other considered ”left wing” parties such as « Europe Ecologie » (12,19%) also known as “the green”. Next Sunday, they will be united under one umbrella against UMP (Nicolas Sarkozy’s party), which only scored 26,2% and which cannot count on any external support. Jean Marie Le Pen’s nationalist party maintains its lists on one hand. On the other hand, center-right forces have been decimated with the crush of Modem, François Bayrou’s party (member of ALDE) scoring 3,27% and it’s clear opposition to Sarkozy’s government. These are the overall striking facts of this election. So what happened to France?

 Before the elections Sarkozy opened big debates on National Identity and on Environmental issues: the result is Le Pen’s rebirth and Green power growing stronger. Ironically, « UMP » can’t count on either of these political forces, and other natural allies such as the center-right no longer exist.

What about the ones who did not vote? Some media and politicians believe that French citizens simply do not value the importance of Regional Elections. But in reality people refrained from voting, because it’s their only way to show unhappiness toward this government. Some are unhappy because they don’t agree with Sarkozy’s politic: they want to keep their privileges and don’t like the French president to disrupt the establishment. Others think that he didn’t deliver its 2007 promises. Moreover, they are really fed up with a president who claims he is able to reform Capitalism. But in reality he has done nothing else than creating a new tax every month.

This situation is indeed very scary for the democracy in general and for classical liberals in particular. The bipolarity of the French Politics is more and more obvious, the right-extremists are back, the French socialists didn’t make their intellectual revolution and still advocate for the old ideology of class’s struggle.

Most of all : no independent liberal party has been able to participate in this poll. The situation is so desperate for the French classical liberals that some of them called to vote for Frédéric Bastiat. On this gloomy Sunday, I’ve spent my afternoon retweeting @alexanderplahr about G. Westerwelle at the congress of the FDP, and @libdems who had also a congress with@nick_clegg, their president.

Is there still hope for the French classical liberals? Those last ones are very active on the blogosphere, bypassing mainstream media. Alternative Libérale is trying hard to unify every single freedom fighter, in the context of a difficult political system for new party to break through. What about taking control of an existing party from the inside? Until now the french liberals gained very limited power into the UMP. Bayrou has destroyed the center (ex UDF) to create the Modem, which happened to fail. Still you can dream of gathering these 53% of non-voters into some form of new political force. But they perhaps simply don’t believe at all in the political system. Or lose hope that, with socialism so deeply anchored in the society, it cannot be reformed. They gave up. It’s more likely that a majority of French are waiting for everything but the free-market revolution.

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Jean-Paul Oury, Founding member and former vice-president of Alternative Libérale. Blogger on Ma liberté and creator of the group « I bet I can find every european liberal on facebook ».

With the help of Ludovic Lassauce for proofreading.

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