Defeat of the fringe

Agnès Poirier, on The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site, makes an interesting observation about the first round of voting in the French presidential election:

In a historic rate of participation, 86% of the electorate went voting. Friends and colleagues all over the country, and in London, reported queuing for up to an hour in order to cast their vote. Then, the reaction turned to one of surprise: the French, after all, feel more comfortable when issues are neatly ideologised - left or right. Forget the third way, they are not ready for it yet. What they want is a clear choice. Then came the dreaded realisation that May 6 would reopen France's wounds by, whatever the result, antagonising half of the population. If Sarkozy is elected, expect months of protest, police repression and riots.

An interesting moment came when Arlette Laguiller, la Trotskyite chérie of the French, called her voters to support Royal on the second round against Sarkozy. In 2002, she didn't want to choose between Chirac and Le Pen. For her, Sarkozy is more dangerous for France than Le Pen. Revealing.

Revealing, indeed, but also quite a heartening outcome in one respect. With a remarkable voter turnout, the political extremes have done particularly badly. One could tell from his graceless castigation of the electorate that Jean-Marie Le Pen was stricken with disappointment at his poor fourth place. The change in Mme Laguiller's approach to second-round voting suggests that the far Left also understands the weakness of its position. She urges a Socialist vote "sans réserve et sans illusion", which is what Trotskyites usually say when they've been badly beaten.

Le Monde gives a run-down of the candidates to the left of the Socialists, and it makes encouraging reading. It also makes the point about the Trotskyites' earlier refusal to back Chirac against Le Pen in 2002, and notes that yesterday the Communist Party received the lowest vote in its history, at less than 2%. (Recall that in an earlier Republic, in the November 1946 elections, the Communists came first in the popular vote.) One can say many things in criticism of President Mitterrand, but his handling of relations with the PCF was, if unprincipled, highly successful in banishing the party to the political fringe.

I am firmly of the view that the least bad political system for a reasonably homogeneous constitutional democracy is one where large parties of the moderate Left and moderate Right dominate the political system, and between whom political office can alternate. (This is one reason that I never supported the old SDP in the 1980s.) In those circumstances, there is an electoral incentive - if not necessity - for them to form a coalition of those who broadly subscribe to the parties' respective sets of principles, with the more publicly appealing elements of those coalitions forming the parties' leadership. This sort of arrangement makes, on balance, for better public administration, because it reduces the influence of small parties, which have no incentive to appeal to a broad section of public opinion. It is a good thing that the French fringes have been defeated and that the electoral choice is as clear as it is.

UPDATE: Reading this back, I see one phrase that might be misinterpreted and that I ought therefore to explain. By "reasonably homogeneous", I mean with regard to shared values. I emphatically don't mean the phrase to refer to ethnicity, being a strong believer in the merits of a diverse and cosmopolitan society, and in the cultural and other benefits of immigration.