Regularly in the French political debate, the idea of introducing proportional voting in legislative elections comes back to the table.
Proportional legislative elections? For years, this proposal in favor of a change in the voting system has been a frequent topic of debate. Some politicians have not hesitated to make it a campaign promise. Today, the 577 deputies of the National Assembly are elected by a two-round majority single-member constituency system, a system that is sometimes criticized because it excludes fair representation of majority votes in the legislative body. Proportional representation was briefly applied under the Fifth Republic, notably in 1986 when the socialist president François Mitterrand introduced it in an attempt to counter the inevitable rise of the right after a defeat in the cantonal elections.
However, on March 16, 1986, the RPR-UDF majority won the legislative elections, leading Jacques Chirac to Matignon and inaugurating the first period of cohabitation of the Fifth Republic. The National Front then obtained 35 seats in parliament. This is the only time that this voting method, which allocates seats to lists of candidates proportionally to the number of votes received, has been used under the Fifth Republic.
Who is defending proportional legislative elections?
But since then, the idea of reinstating proportional representation in legislative elections has continued to appeal to certain political parties. François Bayrou, the president of the Democratic Movement (MoDem), had sent a letter to Emmanuel Macron to this effect for the 2022 legislative elections. Other political figures had followed suit, from Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the Insoumis to… Marine Le Pen, a National Rally MP.
For its defenders, this voting method would allow for a National Assembly that is much more representative of the French. But for its detractors, proportional representation would mean a hemicycle that is impossible to govern, a majority that is too unstable to vote on laws, since it would be difficult for any party to obtain an absolute majority. It would therefore be mandatory for the parties to form alliances and find compromises of circumstance. But above all, reinstating this voting method would mechanically open the door a little more to the extreme right, which for years has been able to be the party for which the French vote the most in a single round.