Le Président de la France

This weekend, France will be having the preliminary presidential election for one of the most interesting political races in the world. This is Marine Le Pen’s third rodeo, but due to the chaos surrounding this election she actually has an (outside) chance of winning this. What chaos do I refer to? Mostly, the complete collapse of the incumbent Socialist Party.

It initially looked as though the rightward party (Les Republicains) would simply take over and everybody would breathe a sigh of relief that there was a rightward alternative to the government besides the National Front. Then Les Republicains went and found themselves a candidate who promptly landed in a mess of trouble. The Socialist Party did not necessarily do themselves any more favors than Les Republicains, drawing a splinter candidacy to its immediate right and a strengthened insurgency to its left.

The end result is that there are four candidates polling near one another that have a chance at making the runoff. The establishment’s savior is Emmanuel Macron (who came up previously at Ordinary Times here, long before he was a candidate), a man without a political party. The guy who could have spared everybody a lot of heartburn lost in the primary. The incumbent party is falling apart and nominated a guy who used his opening remarks in a debate to talk about anti-Muslims bigotry (a worthy topic, perhaps, but not on the pulse of the French mood). And as Americans, all we can do is watch and hope that we have served as a cautionary tale.

All of this is in the backdrop of the fact that France’s entire system is relatively unusual in Europe in that they have a powerful presidency at all.

France’s electoral system is unique in Western Europe. In most countries, the head of state is either a hereditary monarch or a president indirectly elected by parliament. These leaders leave most, if not all, of the day-to-day governance of the country to the head of government: the prime minister. In France, presidents are directly elected by the public and have substantial powers, making them the most powerful national leaders in the region. They can appoint and fire ministers, including the prime minister, almost at will, and submit bills to a national referendum. They can take extraordinary powers in case of a national crisis. They can also dissolve the lower house to provoke a snap election, and the electoral fate of the congressmen is so strongly linked to that of the president that their parliamentary majority is much more obedient than in the United States Congress. {…}

French elections are, in a sense, a direct coronation of an elected king by his people, a few million votes serving as a holy chrism. In 1852, Karl Marx wrote in his classic work “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”: “The National Assembly (…) exhibits in its individual representatives the manifold aspects of the national spirit, but in the President this national spirit finds its incarnation. As against the Assembly, he possesses a sort of divine right; he is President by the grace of the people.”

There is so single “right” political system. Questions of whether a government should be federal or unitary, have a king (or queen) or do away with the monarchy, have even or lumpy legislative representation, almost always depend on the lay of the land. The facts on the ground make a system that’s right for one place wrong for another. There is, however, a pretty consistent bias in constitutional design theory that a parliamentary system beats a presidential one every time. In a parliamentary system, the executive is directly answerable to the legislature. It’s hard for presidential systems to avoid legislatures ultimately being answerable to the president. In France, they don’t especially try to avoid it.

As the earliest modern republics, there are reasons that both the US and France would have presidential systems. When the decisions were being made, the norm was to have a strong singular leader and the problems associated with that were more familiar – and therefore more tolerable – than the problems of rule-by-committee. Further, the US tried rule-by-committee and it failed. (France, too, tried a lot of things to see them fail.) That made it so that when DeGaul pushed for a more presidential system – at a time when parliamentary systems were more common – the public was receptive. And when there was a natural pull towards the executive in the US, we already had the executive in place who was elected by the people through the states who was ready to take power.

What’s noteworthy about the presidential vs parliamentary system is that it can run contrary to a lot of the other constitutional design systems. Whereas most of the time you look towards the people to determine the system. Do they view themselves as a collection of quasi-independent entities? Then federalism. Do they view themselves as a singular entity? Then unitary. Is there a particular reason that votes over here need to count more than votes over there? Consider it. Otherwise, don’t. But when it comes to presidential systems, the more the populace wants it, generally speaking, the less they should have it. Presidential systems are most popular among populations that desire strong, singular leaders. Those two make for a remarkably bad combination.

The United States and France have both the presidential system in common as well as having candidate primaries, both of which are unusual from an international standpoint. And both of which can cause problems. This is especially true in the United States where we have an eccentric presidential selection system that is extremely prohibitive of third party and independent efforts. France manages to avoid that (more on that in a bit), they’ve been experiencing some growing pains with it:

The strange thing was that the open primaries, christened by the socialists during Hollande’s election in 2012, were supposed to strengthen them, but it did not really work this time. To win highly unexpected nominations, both Hamon and Fillon had to run aggressive platforms that either made them less appealing to the electorate as a whole or increased the likelihood of campaign flip-flops. And these preliminary contests have also intensified the presidential frenzy, leading to an American-style “permanent campaign.” “The virus of primaries has infested the entire presidential system,” wrote the scholar Christian Salmon in 2014. “It has multiplied the presidential figure by making the election of the president of the Republic by universal suffrage, not only the key moment of democratic life, but the element that over-determines all the strategies of the political actors.”

Putting #BanPrimaries aside, this was an issue for both of the main parties. On paper, François Fillon was a reasonably credible candidate (former Prime Minister and cabinet official with a long record of public service) but even before his recent troubles was a candidate with less broad appeal than Alain Juppe. Even Nicolas Sarkozy, who had problems but was still more of a known quantity, would have been less risky if he had enough chits to call in for the nomination. The Socialists were likely doomed either way, party establishment favorite Manuel Valls may have had more success clipping Macron’s rise than nominee Benoit Hamon had stifling left-wing Jean-Luc Melenchon.

Ultimately, I don’t favor #BanPrimaries for the United States because our political parties are basically hard-coded into the system. If we’re around in fifty years, we will almost certainly have a Republican Party and a Democratic Party and the only question is what they will stand for. As such, giving people voice over the trajectory of the parties is really quite important. As this election demonstrates, however, France’s system is more elastic. The next President of France almost certainly belongs to a party that has never actually won the presidency before (though if it’s Fillon, Les Republicains is mostly just a rebranding of the Union for a Popular Movement). That’s the sort of situation where you don’t even need primaries because if the party establishments get it wrong their parties can be deposed (see also, Canada). And as we’ve learned this election in the US and in France and in Britain, the party membership can themselves get it wrong.

The French system is more flexible because they have runoffs. That encourages more adventurist voting because is decreases (though does not eliminate) the likelihood of a spoiler. Someone like Melenchon or especially Macron would have a difficult time gaining traction if their vote increased the likelihood of Le Pen winning and might not even run. And if they did run, of course, that would increase the likelihood of someone like Le Pen winning with thirty percent of the vote. It’s lose-lose. First Past the Post systems stink. Just in case that’s not clear enough for you: First Past the Post systems stink a lot. The US system is further complicated by the electoral college, but even switching to a straight popular vote doesn’t especially fix the problem. (Ask Maine!)

That said, runoffs are themselves imperfect:

The first round typically attracts up to at least a dozen candidates and is prejudiced in favor of those with a strong electoral base rather than wide consensus appeal. In 2002, the incumbent conservative Jacques Chirac and the National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, father of current leader Marine, got to the second round with less than 20 percent and 17 percent of the votes, respectively, whereas the Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was eliminated with slightly more than 16 percent. While Jospin had been polling neck-and-neck with Chirac throughout the campaign, Le Pen got less than 18 percent of the vote in the runoff. Five years later, the centrist François Bayrou (18 percent) was eliminated by Nicolas Sarkozy (31 percent) and Segolene Royal (26 percent) in the first round, but the opinion polls showed that this moderate and appreciated figure would have beaten both in a runoff.

Many of these same problems exist with my preferred Instant Runoff Voting, but all of those are preferable to the alternative. And despite being the squishy centrist type that I am, I’m also not sure the high-consensus, low-base candidate is preferable. If Macron wins, I suspect we’re likely to see that a person with no base has a lot of difficulty governing. In Macron’s case it’s likely to be directly attributable to a lack of legislative seats (there is almost no scenario in which Les Republicains don’t dominate the legislature), but it’s hard for the center to hold in any event. And in the event that it does, you start running into fears of a one-party monopoly. That’s the danger of going with approval voting, another popular alternative.

To bring the piece back to the start, there really is no perfect system for elections. There is no perfect system for candidate selection. The question is whether the poison offered here is better than the poison offered there. Even given the problems, runoff systems still do tend to be preferable to plurality elections in presidential systems. It is, as much as anything, the “presidential system” where much of the problems reside.