The role of elections in a democracy is to resolve conflicts peacefully, by putting competing projects in competition under conditions that allow the minority to acquiesce to the verdict of the ballot boxes. Is it necessary to write that the accelerated sequence of the 2024 legislative elections did not exactly produce this effect? Let us content ourselves here with listening to the feelings expressed by voters the day after the second round, collected by converging studies*. Alongside the relief expressed mainly by voters of the New Popular Front and Ensemble, disappointment and worry dominate, even despair and anger. So much so that 71% of French people (Elabe) do not say they are satisfied with the result of the elections and the composition of the new Assembly. Where do we find elections with which more than two-thirds of the inhabitants of the countries where they take place say they are dissatisfied?
This disappointment could be explained by the designation of a Chamber where none of the parties or coalitions in the running obtains, far from it, an absolute majority. This situation, which is completely commonplace in European democracies, does not produce the same feeling of disappointment there. Our neighbours adapt to it while waiting for the parties to seek the combinations that will allow them to form majority coalitions around a government project that is patiently and sometimes fiercely discussed, even if this can take weeks or even months. This undoubtedly clashes with our habit of major election nights when elections for the allocation of powers are most often turning points, but our neighbours accommodate it.
If we have more difficulty accepting the result of July 7th calmly, it is not only because we are not used to it, but because the situation that France is experiencing today is, neither more nor less, a situation of deadlock. In his “Letter to the French”, the bulk of which is addressed to the political leadership, Emmanuel Macron expresses a pious wish that illustrates by its illusory nature the current impasse, calling for “building a solid majority”. With the best will in the world, it is difficult to see on the table of the many discussions anything that even remotely resembles a possible solid majority, if by “solid” we mean being at least temporarily safe from a motion of censure that overthrows the government.
Our political landscape is no longer functioning
A solution may come, but if we are unable to see it for the moment, it is simply because the articulation between our political culture, our voting methods and our political landscape is no longer working. In this deadlock, we want to highlight here, beyond the posturing, the games of apparatus and personal ambitions, the major role of the voting method, which, by its unsuitability to a political space that has become tripolar, leads to all sorts of perverse effects. Indeed, the comparison with other European democracies, where the culture of compromise and the science of coalitions prevail, is not only a question of political culture. France has already gone through long democratic periods, under the Third and Fourth Republics, where this culture and these practices prevailed. Today, it is totally imbued with the majority fact, even though the organization of the political space into three poles which refuse to come together, represented in this election by the NFP, Ensemble and the RN (four if we distinguish an autonomous space for the Republicans), does not allow one of these poles to have majority support in the country, and makes it very difficult to obtain it through the ballot box.
And yet we continue to reason as if the majority fact were the only possible outcome of an election. When Jordan Bardella says that he will only accept the post of Prime Minister on the condition of having an absolute majority in the Assembly, he assumes that a force that brings together a large third of the voters has the vocation to hold half of the seats and to exercise unshared power. When Jean-Luc Mélenchon claims after the second round that the entirety of the program of the New Popular Front applies, he goes even further, considering that first place is worth a majority, even though the coalition that he claims to embody obtained less than 30% of the votes in the first round and less than a third of the seats in the second. And in a way, Emmanuel Macron in 2022, by dispensing with building a coalition that would allow him to achieve an absolute majority in the National Assembly, acted as if the majority (as a percentage of votes cast and not of voters) resulting from the second round of the presidential election was worth a mandate to govern alone. Of course, France has been governed over the last two years, and many texts have been adopted. But this situation involved the adoption of a controversial pension reform in conditions that were at the very least acrobatic, using Article 49-3, and probably led to the adventurous dissolution of June 2024 for fear of having to face a victorious motion of censure.
The functioning of our national political life is dominated by the culture of the majority fact, while the real state of the country strongly invites us to move away from this vision. This change of perspective would be less difficult if it did not come up against the voting method in force for legislative elections, which prevents the formation of a majority through negotiation and compromise. This is where the comparison with our neighbours in the European Union finds its limits. If these countries have a culture of compromise, it is also because their Parliament is elected by proportional representation, which almost mechanically implies the absence of an absolute majority for a single camp. Our two-round single-member majority vote is, on the contrary, designed to produce a majority. In theory at least, because it only really works in a binary system, opposing two camps that share the majority of the votes.
The verdict of the ballot boxes of July 7 clearly denies the idea that the voting system in force for the legislative elections would guarantee a majority. It has only done so until now because our political space was essentially organized around the binary confrontation between the right and the left, such that one of the two camps necessarily had the majority if the other did not. However, certain conditions were required. In 2012 and 2017, majorities emerged, despite the emergence of a third pole with the National Front, only by virtue of the “presidential then legislative” sequence, and to the detriment of participation. For the legislative elections that followed the presidential elections to produce an absolute majority, it was necessary for a portion of the voters to give up between the two elections, with the camp of the vanquished leaving the field open to the voters of the elected president. In this respect, it is not consistent to praise the single-member constituency as favouring the formation of a majority and to deplore abstention in legislative elections. The two assertions do not go together: in our political landscape with three irreconcilable poles, if everyone voted in legislative elections, they would not produce a majority.
The perverse effects of the voting method
We are therefore operating with a voting method that is unsuited to the political moment we are going through, and which generates all sorts of structuring and sometimes perverse effects that it is not superfluous to list.
1/ A demanding qualification threshold for the second round (12.5% of registered voters) which forces alliances in the first round under penalty of elimination. The Nupes of 2022 and the New Popular Front of 2024 are the result of this, pushing the left-wing parties to agree despite serious differences, leading to the penalizing impossibility of designating a leader. This obligation to agree gives disproportionate weight, in the negotiations, to the future ally who has the least to lose if the agreement does not succeed. It then means that the deputies who competed under the same banner are tied parties, being elected in part with the voters of their partners. This is why it is very difficult today to ask the socialists and the ecologists to detach themselves from the Insoumis to join another coalition. It is, neither more nor less, asking them to betray part of their voters.
2/ The practice of withdrawals, an integral part of the two-round single-member constituency vote. In a bipolar world, it did not present any difficulty within the same camp. In the event of competition within the left or the right, the least well-placed of each camp withdrew to leave it to the voters to decide between a left-right duel. Here it was a question of blocking the RN, which resulted in withdrawals between opponents from the day before, which were criticized for this reason. These withdrawals also make questionable a competition consisting of saying who is the greatest force today in the Assembly, between the New Popular Front and a hypothetical Ensemble-LR alliance, when each owes seats to the withdrawals practiced by the other camp.
3/ The useful vote, increasingly weighty when a party like the National Rally is both repulsive and dominant. Criticizing the practice of withdrawals would imply attributing to triangular contests a purity that they do not have. They have led some voters, anxious to block the RN, to speculate on the best of those remaining in the running to beat the far-right candidate. This is evidenced by these constituencies where the candidate who came third and stayed in the race lost votes between the two rounds, his voters having preferred to switch to the best-placed candidate.
We are therefore dealing with a voting method that is neither readable nor predictable, that forces and locks alliances in conditions that make recompositions much more difficult, that puts candidates and voters under pressure when blocking becomes the priority, and which, let us remember, has only produced one majority: that of the massive disgruntled voters. If, in addition, the only prospect it offers is that of a future dissolution after a year of deadlocks or attempts doomed to failure, it would be wise to consider another method of designating the future Assembly.
*Emmanuel Rivière, consultant and opinion specialist, lecturer at Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne and Sciences Po.
Verian for the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, Harris Interactive for Challenge.
.