Pyrrhic Victories

The French got a big laugh out of the U.S. presidential election fiasco. Americans are always giving lessons on democracy to the rest of the world, they chortled, but can’t even count ballots. Worst of all, they make a travesty of popular government by giving the leadership of the free world to the guy who came in second. On a smaller scale, but with huge political implications, the same thing happened in Paris last week: Socialist Bert-rand Delanoë won only 49.6% of the popular vote but picked up a majority of municipal council seats because of a precinct-based voting system roughly similar to the U.S. Electoral College. So much for the French lesson in democracy.

The partying went on until 2 a.m. in front of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’ city hall, as Delanoë made a victory speech and accordionists entertained champagne-swilling supporters of his Socialist-Communist-Green coalition. But while they celebrated wresting control of the French capital from the Gaullist Rally for the Republic party that has ruled it for nearly a quarter century, elsewhere the picture was bleak. In the voting for mayors and city councils of 36,000 municipalities, Gaullist and center-right parties took 38 large and midsize cities from the left and lost only 17 to their rivals. Overall, the rightists won 52% of the total vote.

All of which was bad news for Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who is expected to square off against Gaullist President Jacques Chirac in next year’s national elections. Pollsters and pundits had predicted a “pink tide” of leftist victories that would have given Jospin a crucial boost in advance of next spring’s parliamentary and presidential votes. Instead, Jospin was engulfed by a “blue tide” of conservative victories that raised worrisome questions about his future chances. Perhaps the most alarming sign was that five of his cabinet members were defeated in local contests, including such stalwarts as Labor Minister Elisabeth Guigou in Avignon, education chief Jack Lang in Blois and transport boss Jean-Claude Gayssot in Béziers.

Jospin immediately promised to draw conclusions from the results. His first response was to rein in the practice of allowing officials to “accumulate” several elective offices: last week Jospin obliged cabinet members who had won municipal polls to choose between their ministerial portfolios and their mayor’s seats. Other changes may be in the offing, as the strong showing of the Greens and the collapse of the Communists may lead Jospin to give the ecologists more weight in his coalition — at the risk of seeing the disgruntled Communists harden their positions on social issues.

Chirac, meanwhile, was rubbing his hands in glee over his suddenly improved prospects. Ever since he unwisely called — and lost — a snap parliamentary election in 1997, he has been a deeply wounded leader, forced to share power with Jospin and shorn of his image as a master strategist. As a result, many analysts were ready to write off Chirac’s re-election chances. But the conservatives’ unexpectedly strong showing last week points to a real horse race in the 2002 contests.

The bad news for Chirac was the loss of Paris, which he ruled as mayor from 1977 until his presidential victory in 1995. Funding scandals going back to Chirac’s tenure and multiple corruption charges surrounding his hand-picked successor, Jean Tiberi, caused widespread voter disgust over the Gaullist “system.” After Chirac replaced Tiberi with Philippe Séguin as the rpr’s official candidate, the disavowed mayor decided to run as an independent and split the conservative vote. In Lyons, similar divisions on the right handed a narrow victory to Socialist Gérard Collomb, giving the left control of France’s third-largest city for the first time in almost a century.

Though the results gave heart to the embattled conservatives — and pause to Jospin’s forces — analysts cautioned against reading too much into these grassroots contests. A high level of abstentions — almost 38% in second-round voting — makes it hard to gauge the real balance of forces, and voters were largely swayed by local issues. Thus the election was not what Jospin had hoped it would be: a plebiscite on his government, which is presiding over one of Europe’s strongest economies (nearly 3% growth this year) and has succeeded in bringing unemployment down from more than 12% to 9% since coming to power in 1997. The French don’t like lessons in democracy from the other side of the Atlantic, but the late Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, could have told them that “all politics is local.”