As one of only two countries outside North America I’ve been to more than once, France holds a special place in my heart. France also has a very interesting election coming up over the next year. France, unlike every other major European country, has primaries that are somewhat similar to the US’s presidential primaries; the major two will take place in November (for the Republicans) and in January (for the Socialists). The Front National’s candidate is already a given. This post will mostly not be about the 2017 election, except where necessary. It will be background to set the stage for those who want to follow this year’s election. However, a brief overview is probably needed.
Socialist Party – France’s Socialist Party is similar to other social-democratic parties across Western Europe, such as the Social Democrats in countries like Germany and Sweden. Like these parties, it has moved somewhat to the center over the last few decades but still sits significantly to the left of the Democratic Party. The incumbent Socialist president, Francois Hollande, is France’s most unpopular president in decades, if not ever.
Republican Party – France’s main party of the right constantly changes its name, but for now it is known as the Republican Party. In the Fifth Republic period (post-1958), the right has been led by the somewhat authoritarian nationalist Charles de Gaulle (1958-1968), then became more liberal in the vein of Britain’s Conservative Party under Georges Pompidou and Valery Giscard d’Estaing. Under Jacques Chirac (1988-2007), the party placed itself on the right in matters both fiscal and cultural, and Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012) increased the party’s popularity among voters concerned about immigration, Islam, and terrorism. However, the party remains a supporter of the European Union and the euro.
National Front – The National Front, like other culturally conservative populist parties, dislikes European federalism, immigrants, and cultural change, while attacking the mainstream right for cutting social programs and hurting French workers.
[Note: Throughout this diary, I will be using the Partisan Voting Index. For those unfamiliar, a PVI of S+3 means that in an average election, the Socialists will receive 53% of the two-party vote, while a PVI of R+7 means the Republicans will receive 57%. In some areas, one of the minor parties earns more votes than one of the major parties. I will note areas with strong third-party presence but PVIs are going to be calculated among the two traditional major parites]
France is divided into regions (some were combined recently, but I will be using the traditional ones), which are further divided into departments.
Southwestern France is one of the lesser known French areas; it isn’t visited by tourists in significant numbers.
Here is a map of France, with Southwestern France in yellow.
Aquitaine: The southwesternmost region of France is known as Aquitaine (5.0% of France’s population). Aquitaine contains beaches, mountains, and farmland, as well as the major city of Bordeaux. Like the rest of France’s southwest, it tends to vote for the Socialists.
Four of Aquitaine’s five departments are relatively safe for Socialist Party candidates. Pyrenees Atlantiques, in the south of the province, contains France’s Basque country and the city of Pau. While it is generally safe for the Socialists, it is the only one of the five departments with a conservative heritage. It shifted from R+4 in 1988 to S+6 today, among the largest shifts of any French department. The region was the strongest for France’s centrist party, represented in the 2012 presidential election by Pau Mayor Francois Bayrou. This is an interesting parallel to the UK, where the Liberal Democrats perform well in rural areas with distinct ethnic heritage going back centuries, such as Cornwall and parts of Scotland. Pau is the largest city in Pyrenees Atlantiques (pop. 85,000) and has a PVI of S+8. The other major urban area, Biarritz-Bayonne-Anglet, is swingier, at S+1. The rural areas of the department are S+6 (a pattern we will see consistently in France is that the urban-rural divide is much weaker than in the US).
Landes, also coastal and situated between Pau and Bordeaux, is an overwhelmingly rural department with a PVI of S+6.
Gironde, the department containing Bordeaux (pop. 245,000, metro 1.14 million), is S+5, but this disguises wide ideological variance within it. La Teste de Bouch, a medium-sized town, and Le Bouscat, a suburb of Bordeaux, are the only population centers in the department to vote for Sarkozy in 2012 (R+10 and R+3, respectively). Bordeaux itself comes in at S+5, mirroring the province (French cities tend to be only moderately left-leaning, a stark contrast to America). Like most French cities, the Front National performs poorly there. Two Gironde towns stick out for how left-wing they are, the working-class suburbs of Cenon (S+19) and Begles (S+20, with strong support for France’s Left).
Lot et Garonne, another small rural department situated upriver from Bordeaux, is Aquitaine’s only swingy province, voting for the winner in every French election since 1974, when it voted Socialist. Its former Socialist heritage has been lost, and it is now perfectly perched in France’s center, with an even PVI.
Dordogne, the northeasternmost department in the region, is both physically beautiful and pretty strongly left-wing, with an S+7 PVI. It is also famous for containing the caves at Lascaux. Like some neighboring departments in other regions, its Socialist margins decreased significantly in the 1980s and 1990s due to the regional hometown popularity of Jacques Chirac in and around France’s Massif Central.
Midi-Pyrenees (4.5% of France’s population) is the heart of southwest France, touching neither the Atlantic nor the Mediterranean. It too is a strong region for the Socialist Party.
The tiny mountainous departments of Ariege and Hautes Pyrenees are both left-wing strongholds. The former is S+12, while the latter is S+10.
Haute Garonne, home to Toulouse, is S+7. The city of Toulouse is one of France’s only major cities that has a strong Left (probably due its industrial nature); it too has a weak Front National. Toulouse exemplifies a common pattern in France; the 2007 election marked a leftward shift for nearly every major city in France as some culturally liberal voters on the right left the party due to Sarkozy. One could parallel 2007 in France to 1992 in the United States in this respect. While Toulouse is S+11 today, it was only S+4 in 1995, the last normal election prior to 2007. Every population center in the department, as well as its rural areas, gave Hollande at least 56% in 2012.
Gers, a rural but flat department west of Toulouse most interesting for containing the town of Condom, is moderately left-leaning like most of southwestern France’s agricultural areas. Its PVI is S+5, which is actually lower than it used to be.
Tarn et Garonne, is north of Toulouse, and like the neighboring Lot et Garonne in Aquitaine is distinct because of its perfectly 50-50 status. Like Lot et Garonne, it used to lean to the Socialists, but this gradually disappeared between 1988 and today.
Tarn, northeast of Toulouse, is half farmland and half mountains and is S+4. Its two main towns, Albi (S+7) and Castres (EVEN), essentially average out to equal the department’s PVI score.
Aveyron, in the region’s far northeast, is unique within the region for its right-wing heritage. In 1974 it was R+5, and as recently as 1995 it was still R+4, but it now sits at S+3. I don’t have a good reason as for why, however.
Finally, there is Lot, an S+10 department containing some of southwestern France’s tourism jewels. It too had a “Chirac effect” but is now more left-wing than ever.
Limousin, Jacques Chirac’s home region, is small (1.1% of France’s population), rural, and poor, and voters there had significant allegiance to him in a “local boy makes good” kind of way, similar to Bill Clinton in Arkansas, despite Limousin’s status as the most left-wing place in France.
Creuse, the epitome of poor rural “backwards” France, is S+8. One can contrast this with its American equivalent, West Virginia, which is now over R+10, to understand some of the differences between French and American politics. Despite this Socialist heritage and strength, Creuse was R+1during Chirac’s 1995 election.
Correze, where Chirac’s family is from, jumped from S+8 pre-Chirac to R+9 under Chirac and is now S+10.
Haute-Vienne contains Limoges, the only large locality in the region. Both Limousin and the rural areas are over S+10.
Poitou-Charente, on and near France’s central Atlantic coast, contains only 2.7% of France’s residents. It is the last of the traditional left-wing strongholds in rural France (although Bretagne, profiled in Part 2, is a newer region of strength for the Socialists).
Charente, in the southeast of the region, is S+7 and the is the only part of the region which has been left-leaning for decades rather than a newer convert to the Socialist cause; not coincidentally it borders some very left-wing areas.
Vienne, in Poitou-Charente’s northeast, contains the strongly left-wing (S+13) city of Poitiers. The department as a whole is S+5, but until 2007 it was pretty swingy, voting for the winner all four times between 1974 and 1995. The more northwestern part of France, which Poitou-Charente is near, has been turned off by Nicolas Sarkozy and his policies.
Charente-Maritime, containing the S+10 town of La Rochelle, is nonetheless a 50-50 department due to some uncharacteristically right-wing rural territory. This area, the Vendee (see Part 2), has been a traditionalist, reactionary, strongly Catholic region ever since they attempted to launch a counter-revolution to the French Revolution. Time has tempered many of these impulses, but the unusually conservative voters remain.
Deux-Sevres has seen a rapid move leftward mirrored only by Basque Country and Bretagne (see Part 2). An R+6 PVI in 1974 has changed into one of S+7 today. Its main population center, Niort, has seen a similar move and is now S+13.
This concludes my look at Southwestern France, France’s most safe territory.