Under the Fourth and Fifth Republics the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) was one of the most important forces in the shaping of the party system. This status only began to diminish in the 1980s with the victory of François Mitterrand in the presidential and legislative elections of 1981. Although the Communist Party is a shadow of its former self, the shape of the party system and its behaviour over the post-war period is explicable only in terms of the PCF’s historical comportment. No discussion of the French party system is possible without taking into account the size and nature of...

Approaches to the study of party system change tend to emphasise, on the one hand, broad electoral trends, such as disaffection with ‘governmental’ political parties, or increasing electoral volatility and, on the other, institutional developments, such as changes to voting systems. Such ‘macro’-level analysis can at times treat parties as unitary actors, possessed of one ‘response’ to their changing environment, an approach which underplays analysis of the party itself. This chapter offers a two-tier analysis of the interaction between developments within the party system as a whole, and the internal politics of the French PS.

At both levels, an appreciation...

‘Utopia has come to French history’, declared René Dumont on 26 April 1974. Conscious of the necessity of establishing such a utopia, he was of the opinion that the newly founded ecologist movement should ‘organise so as to establish itself permanently as an influence in French political life’ (Dumont, 1974: 5). Twenty-five years later, this utopian movement has been replaced by a complex organisation. In a quarter of a century, the Greens have had the opportunity to try out a number of organisational approaches and to test various electoral strategies and to develop novel internal practices based on their own...

The plural left marks a new type of alignment within the French party system. Left parties had cooperated previously according to varying formulae. The type of majority known asconcentration républicaine(Goguel, 1946) is arguably the first manifestation, followed by the hegemony of thedélégation des gauchesin the 1900s, which put through anti-clerical measures of ‘republican defence’. The interwar period witnessed thecartel des gauches– tactical electoral alliances of Radicals, SFIO and selected ‘left republicans’ – invariably unstable and short-lived. Famously, the 1936 Popular Front, a formal alliance of the three main left parties plus smaller allies, managed...

In the summer of 1998 an article inLe Mondeentitled ‘Quand la France s’amuse’ compared the apparently beatific state of mind of the French in the wake of the national team’s World Cup victory with that evoked by Pierre Viansson-Ponté in his celebrated essay ‘Quand la France s’ennuie… ’ written on the eve of the May ‘68 events.¹ As with the original article, such complacency proved at odds with a powerful undercurrent in society which, from the mid-1990s, had seen a backlash against neo-liberalism gather pace against a backdrop of growing social inequality. The backlash took the form of...

The principal dynamic of the French party system under the Fifth Republic has been that of the so-called ‘bipolar quadrille’. By the end of the 1970s, four parties of approximately equal strength were monopolising over 90 per cent of the vote in their respective left and right blocs (Parodi, 1989). Nevertheless, this end-state had taken twenty years to produce, concluding in 1978 with the formation of the UDF. The UDF managed to create an unprecedented alliance between liberal, Christian democrat and radical currents,¹ taking its place as the second right-wing pole next to the Gaullist RPR. The UDF represented the...

Most major European countries are content with just one major party of the centre-right: Britain’s Conservatives, Spain’s PPE, Germany’s CDU–CSU. France has always had at least two. The electoral cycle of April–June 2002, however, held out the prospect of change by transforming the fortunes of France’s centre-right in two ways. A double victory at the presidential and parliamentary elections kept Jacques Chirac in the Elysée and put a large centre-right majority into the National Assembly. Second, most of the hitherto dispersed centre-right family merged into a single formation, the UMP.

Why did this merger happen in 2002, and...

The question of electoral change in France has received a great deal of attention in the past fifteen years, as evidenced by the volume of literature on French parties and elections. The rise of the FN and its ability to establish itself as a serious competitor against mainstream parties of the moderate right are clearly central to this question. The success of the extreme right has largely contributed to altering the balance of forces within the party system: while electorally irrelevant throughout the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s,¹ Le Pen’s party has enjoyed high levels of electoral support...

Since the advent of European Community/European Union politics and the growing influence the supranational arena has over domestic affairs, the potential for the European domain to impinge upon all aspects of national polities has grown. On the face of it, there has been no reason to suspect that European politics would not affect the party systems of these polities in the same way that it has affected, say, policy-making, judicial review and pressure groups. However, the effect to date has been perceived as minimal, even after the introduction of direct elections in 1979. At the comparative level, direct effects on...

The emphasis of the book thus far has been on individual parties and coalitions. Nonetheless, the demand side of the equation also provides an important context to party success because it helps define the political space in which parties must compete for voters. In this chapter, then, we focus on French political space over the last fifteen years as defined by the socio-demographic and attitudinal profiles of the voters. We build upon findings from the two major studies of French voters in the last ten years, namelyL’électeur français en questions(Boy and Mayer, 1990)¹ andL’électeur a ses raisons...