The last month or so in Paris, and well France in general, has been a furious campaign by the political parties for the French equivalent for the midterm elections: les elections municipales. To understand this broad election, there first needs to be some understanding about the administrative divisions in France (ok, please don’t yawn).
France, unlike the United States, is a country where mostly everything is centralized, and power comes from the top down. The government and administration in Paris is followed by the power of the departments, and those departments are divided into the towns and cities. Well, I guess after putting it that way it seems almost the same as home.
The key difference is that while we in the United States have state and local elections at different times and for different terms depending on the local laws, in France all of the mayors and heads of government that are not for the national government are elected at the same time. Hence, this is why it’s the municpals. They happen every seven years, making the mayor and the regional government last longer than that of the President of France. The first round commenced last weekend, and according to Le Monde (the journal of repute), and Liberation (a more left-wing paper), the gauchists (the leftists) gained a slight majority.
Party politics in France differs in many ways. The two largest parties, the Parti Socialiste (left) and the UMP (right), are just a sliver of the other parties, including at least two different communist parties, the national front, and Francois Bayrou’s (in my opinion formidible in rhetoric but wimpy in actual positions) Mouvment for Democracy, or Modem. Many of the races were predictable, such as Brittany and Limousin going for the Socalists, and Nice and the Cote d’Azur for the UMP.
What was of contest were many smaller cities that did vote for the UMP in the last elections, and turned to the Socialists this time. Rouen, several cities in the Loire Valley, and some cities in the heartland of old UMP terrirotry decided to give a majority to either the socialist candidate, or to a leftist majority. While this was only a slight change, it might be for good when it comes to the next round this Sunday.
