With 70 days to go until Round 1 of the French Presidential election, Christiane Taubira, France’s former Justice Minister, has been declared the winner of the Progressive Left’s People’s Primary.
Taubira is known in France for her effort to pass the Marriage Equality bill in 2013, despite considerable opposition from right-wingers. She’s also known for the 2001 Taubira Law, passed when she was a member of the Assemblée Nationale, representing Guiana. Under the law, France acknowledged that its role in the slave trade was a crime against humanity. The law also mandated a new history curriculum to teach kids in school the truth about slavery. blogs.loc.gov/…
Originally, the idea behind the People’s Primary was to unite the fractured Left into one bloc with enough voters to win the election. Individually, none of the seven Left-leaning candidates has enough support to win. Running together, on a united Left ticket, they would have a chance but that goal still remains out of reach.
Despite Taubira’s win, the other major candidates have all vowed to continue their campaigns. The primary attracted a lot of attention and a winner was selected. But, since the primary was unofficial and non-binding, none of the other candidates are willing to step aside for the sake of unity. With 70 days to go, that could change.
Setting aside the tragedy of a divided Left, the People’s Primary is noteworthy for another reason. It introduced a new voting method known as Majority Judgment.
Currently, France’s multi-party system uses two rounds of voting. The top two candidates with the highest vote totals proceed to Round 2 where they compete, head-to-head. Because there are so many candidates running in Round 1, it’s possible to qualify for Round 2 on a narrow base.
For example, in 2017, there were 11 candidates who ran in Round 1. Emmanuel Macron finished 1st with 24.01% of the vote and Marine Le Pen finished 2nd with 21.30%. Together, the two candidates who qualified for Round 2, did so with only 45.31% of the vote. For a majority of voters, this could be seen as less than satisfactory.
In the US, ranked choice voting has been introduced in some local elections to allow voters to express themselves more fully. Majority Judgment is a step in that direction, too, but it differs from ranked choice in a few ways. Instead of ranking candidates in the People’s Primary, voters were asked to express an opinion on each of them using the categories: very good, good, good enough, acceptable and unsatisfactory. (In French, très bien, bien, assez bien, passable and insuffisant-e).
Reflecting the Progressive Left priorities of the People’s Primary, voters gave their opinion by filling in their rating to complete the following sentence:
To win for ecology and social justice in the presidential election, I believe that each of these personalities would be…?”
The winner is named based on the median point of the profile created by the voters’ opinions. Here are the results: primairepopulaire.fr/...
Here are the same results, presented in a table, for those who like to see the numbers.
The tweet says: Christiane Taubira win’s the People’s Primary. Yannick Jadot, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Anne Hidalgo reject her call for unity on the Left.