Our Blog - French Presidential Election

Our Blog - French Presidential Election - Part 1

This is a Presidential Election year in France, and while we were also here in 2017 for the previous Presidential Election, we hadn't been here long enough to really understand it. So I thought I would write up some information for my non-French friends. I'll start with a couple key differences from the US:

The President is elected to a 5-year term (compared to a 4-year term in the US).
It is a 2-round election. If a candidate gets more than 50% of the vote in the first round (which has NEVER happened), they are elected. If not, the top 2 vote-getters continue to a second round, held 2 weeks later.
There are MANY political parties in the first round ... this year, there are 12 candidates in the first round.
All candidates have to get a "sponsorship" (I'll explain later) to be able to be in the first round
Voting is on a single day (a Sunday) and there is only 1 race (that of the President). I'll explain the voting itself later.
There is (in general) no early voting or absentee voting.

How a person becomes a Presidential Candidate

Similar to the US, there is a process around how a person becomes a candidate for the office of French President. There are definitely some differences, starting with the sheer number of different parties. There are also candidates that declare themselves as independent politicians (in many cases shown as "SE" or "sans étiquette" meaning "without label") .

Parties

There are MANY political parties in France ... close to 50 of them ... with 12 different parties represented in the first round of the 2022 Presidential Election. I will color-code the ones below ... Blue being Far Left, Purple being Left/Center Left, Green being Center, Orange being Center Right/Right, Red being Far Right.

There are 4 "major" nationwide parties:

Parti Socialiste (the Socialist Party)
La République En Marche! (translatable as The Republic On The Move, The Republic Moving Forward), President Macron's party that he founded in 2016
Les Republicans
Rassemblement National (the National Rally party, formerly the Front National) headed by Marine Le Pen

In addition to the 4 candidates from these parties, there are 8 other parties with candidates in the first round of voting (see below on why a party wouldn't have a candidate in the first round):

Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste (the "new" Anticapitalist party)
Lutte Ouvrière (Worker's Struggle party), the French Trotskyist political party
La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), launched in 2016 by Jean-Luc Mélenchon
Le Parti communiste français (French Communist Party)
Europe Écologie Les Verts (the Green/Ecology party)
Résistons! (Let's Resist), which was created in 2017 when Jean Lassalle split from the MoDem (Democratic Movement) party
Reconquête, founded in 2021 by Éric Zemmour to split from the Front Nationale/National Rally/party of Le Pen.
Debout la France (France Arise)

The "Parrainage"

If you translate "parrainage", it means sponsorship. To be able to be in the first round, a candidate must get 500 signatures (sponsorships) from among approximately 47,000 elected officials (deputies, senators, mayors, etc). Each elected official can only sponsor one candidate. There are other rules as well, like that you have to get a sponsorship from at least 1 elected official from at least 30 departments or overseas communities, and no more than 10% (so 50) of the sponsorships can come from a given department or community. For example, Anne Hidalgo is the current Mayor of Paris. She can't get more than 50 signatures from the Il-de-France department (which is basically Paris). In 2022, there were 65 different candidates who received at least 1 sponsorship but only 12 who were ale to get the required 500. One thing to note here is that of the 47,000 or so people "able" to give a sponsorship, less than 14,000 actually sponsored a candidate in 2022. So when I mentioned that there are around 50 political parties in France but only 12 of them are in the first round. There were 26 "independent" candidates and 26 candidates from other parties that did not get enough parrainage to be one of the final 12 candidates.

The Campaign

Once you declare yourself as a candidate and get your 500 sponsorships, the candidates get down to their main job of campaigning. They hold rallies and try to meet people across France. We've had several candidates here in Toulouse ... and Tom even went to the rally of Anne Hidalgo (the Socialist candidate), since it was held just next door.

There will be people on the street, many times in the open markets, who will be handing out information about the candidates. In front of the polling places, campaign posters will be put up, similar to these (from the 2017 election).

Equal air-time

In France, there is legislation requiring equal airtime and exposure for all presidential candidates, which gives French radios and TV stations quite a headache. During the "official" campaign period (which started on March 28), media outlets are required to give equal coverage and time to all candidates, and cannot be “explicitly negative” about any of them. This is enforced by communication regulator l'Autorité de régulation de la communication audiovisuelle et numérique (Arcom). Prior to March 28th, candidates were given "equitable" airtime based on a score taking into account the last election and polls. The frontrunners got extra visibility, but that all ended on the 28th. Now, French broadcasters must give all 12 candidates in the race exactly the same airtime. And it’s not just about how much they talk – it’s also about how much they are shown on camera or how much journalists talk about them. As you can imagine, this is quite a logistical nightmare and many broadcasters have said that is discourages them from hosting political shows. The "official" campaign period used to be 5 weeks but it was reduced to 2 weeks due to all of the uproar that it had caused. Critics of the rule also argue that the rule is absurd in that it doesn’t apply to newspapers, websites or social media (where a growing number of people get their news).

Campaign spending and reimbursement

This is one of the interesting aspects that I didn't understand until this year, and it was explained quite well on one of the news channels. Presidential campaigns in France are subject to strict financing rules. In the first round, each candidate is limited at €16.85 million. The two top-polling candidates from the first round (assuming no absolute majority) go through to a second round and they’re allowed to spend an extra €5.66 million. That seems like a lot of money, but is really a drop in the bucket compared to what Trump and Biden (and the various SuperPACs) spent in 2020. Presidential candidates in the first round who win more than 5 percent of the vote can get about €8 million of their campaign costs reimbursed by the government while those with less than 5 percent can only get up to €800,423 reimbursed by the state. Candidates running in the second round can get up to €10.7 million reimbursed by the state. On the news show that I was listening to, they mentioned that in 2017, Marine Le Pen had an expense for insect repellent declined to be reimbursed! The rules are monitored and violators do risk heavy penalties. Case in point .... a court sentenced former President Nicholas Sarkozy to one year in prison (served under house arrest), for spending close to double the legal limit during his failed attempt to win re-election in 2012.

Now let's get to the Voters and the actual voting!

French citizens 18 years of age and older are eligible to vote (with a couple exceptions where a person has had their right to vote removed, like some convicted criminals). In general, voters vote in person on election day (always a Sunday) at their designated polling place. They do not have the concept of "early voting" here, nor really absentee voting. Voting by proxy (voting by "procuration") is possible in some cases, with the proxy being a citizen in the same voting location as the voter.

You register for the electoral role of the city/town where you live and will be sent a voter card. You can see on one side, there are blocks that will be stamped for each election that the person votes.

Actual Voting

In general, voting is done using paper ballots and manual counting. The ballots are not like what we are used to in the US .. it is not a single sheet of paper that lists all of the candidates and normally has multiple offices/things to vote for at the same time. For the Presidential Election of 2022, the ONLY thing that you vote for is the 1 candidate that you want to be the President of France.

On election day, which is always on a Sunday, polling stations open at 8 am and stay open until 6pm, 7pm, or 8pm depending on how large of a town/city it is in. The polling stations are normally town halls and schools. A registered voter enters the polling location that they are registered for and someone from the office checks to be sure that you are actually registered AND for that exact polling station. Next to the entrance, there is a table with a pile of ballot papers for each candidate and a stack of envelopes. The voter takes an envelope and a ballot FROM EACH CANDIDATE. So when you go into the voting booth for the first round of the 2022 Presidential election, you will an envelope and 12 pieces of paper.

They then enter a voting booth, which normally looks like the ones below, so that it is a secret ballot. You go in, pull the curtain, and then you put the single piece of paper which represents your selected candidate in the envelope. All of the other papers get thrown away.

Then you go to the table where the ballot box is, which is transparent and locked. The president of that polling place or their deputy checks the voter identity using the carte electorale and the ID card, and also reads aloud the name of the voter. One exception to this is that in small villages, where the election official would know everybody personally, the ID card may not be required. They then confirm that the voter has only one envelope but is not allowed to touch the envelope at all. The voter must put the envelope into the ballot box themselves at which point the election official says "A voté!", which means "Has voted!". The voter then signs the voter register next to their name and the election official returns their carte electorale, now stamped with the date indicating that they voted) and ID card, and then leaves.