Paris-Lyon-Marseille - Les municipales 2020 suite et fin...

Once the second round of the municipal elections has taken place, the new local councils have one week (or in French terms huit jours) to meet and to elect their excecutive officers - the mayor but also the mayor’s assistants or adjoints. In most cases, the head of the victorious list is also the mayoral candidate, but occasionally, as we shall see a little further down this entry, that is not the case and in others, there can be palace coups staged by ambitious colistiers that leave the heir-apparent on their backsides.

Also, the distribution of the posts of adjoints can be the scene of further horse-trading or pay-offs for deals that were cut between the first and second rounds of the election. Re-elected easily in Paris on 3 July, Anne Hidalgo announced that her team would include no fewer than 37 adjointes and adjoints, in part a reflection of the political diversity of her majority. French municipal government uses a cabinet system.

Finally, the election of the mayor offers other groups within the council a chance to show where they will stand in terms of support or opposition to the ruling group. In most cities this doesn ot really matter because the electoral system is thoroughly skewed towards the victors. In all the communes using the list system, the winners take 50% of the seats before the other half are distributed using PR.

For these reasons, the election of the mayor and their cabinet is known as the troisième tour, the third round - when the élues and élus carve up power between them.

The one-week time limit helps to explain also why, suddenly, France woke up on Friday to find that the déménageurs bretons had turned up at the Hôtel Matignon with their cardboard boxes to start packing up Edouard Philippe’s personal effects. It wouldn’t have been legally impossible for the PM to combine his role as head of government with that of mayor of Le Havre, but it goes against the grain of macroniste discourse. (Whatever that is on any given day.)

I’ll write about the end of Philippe and his replacement with Jean Castex later this week. For now, I’d like to wrap up these three pieces on the municipal elections by looking at Paris, Lyon and Marseille (PLM) and in that order.

For municipal elections, France’s three largest cities are subdivided into electoral districts called arrondissements, so that although the number of votes cast for this or that list suggests they have won the city comfortably - such as the case for Marseille - in fact it’s how the votes fall in each district that determines the political colour of delegates on the city council, which will then elect the mayor. As it happens, in Paris and Lyon, the winning lists also held comfortable majorities in the arrondissements. Hidalgo was re-elected mayor for Paris and Grégory Doucet became the new mayor of Lyon. But it got sticky in Marseille.

We’ll start with Paris. Figure 1, below, from Le Monde shows how 163 seats on the city council worked out.

Figure 1 - delegates of the arrondissements to Paris city council - source Le Monde.

Fears among Hidalgo’s supporters that Agnès Buzyn’s La République en Marche list might gain enough seats to hold the balance of power proved to be unfounded. In fact, Buzyn herself even failed to get a seat in the 17th arrondissement. Her claims that she sees herself as a candidate for 2026 seem rather feeble at the moment.

The colour scheme for Figure 1 is a little misleading, because it bundles the Socialist and Green delegates into one list and thereby masks the presence of Europe Ecologie- Les Verts delegates on the council. In particular it doesn’t show that, to keep her promise to the Greens that they would have a mairie, Hidalgo was forced to give them the 12th, after her lists failed to take the 5th or the 9th. Meanwhile, Rachida Dati , as leader of the opposition on Paris city council, now has a base from which to rebuild whatever political ambitions she may still nourish.

As a final word on Paris, it is worth noting that the 2020 municipal elections have confirmed, if ever it were doubted, that the left-right, east-west divide (along a line from the Porte de Saint-Ouen to the Porte d’Orléans) is as deeply rooted as ever, despite any changes we thought we were witnessing in 2017 and 2019.

Electors in Lyon, the ancient ‘capital of the three Gauls’ as it is also known (although I have noticed that recently the title has been modified to simply capitale des Gaules, which has a rather different meaning and sense to it) were also electing members of the Greater Lyon Metropolitan Council. I’ll just stick to the city of Lyon here. Again the result was straightforward.

Grégory Doucet’s EELV-dominated Maintenant Lyon Pour Tous took 28% in the first round and rallied the support of both the non-aligned left list of Nathalie Perrin-Gilbert which took 11% in the first round and the PS list headed by Sandrine Runel, which had scored 7% across the city. Doucet’s position after 15 March allowed him to insist that a Green candidate head the list in each of the arrondissements and on 28 June the alliance ran out with 53% of the vote, which translated into 51 seats on the 73-seat city council. Figure 2, below, shows the distribution of seats across Lyon. On Saturday 4 July, Doucet was formally inducted as mayor by his predecessor, Gérard Collomb, two days after his fellow Green Bruno Bernard was confirmed as chair of the Greater Lyon authority.

Figure 2 - Lyon city council 2020. Note that the two Green lists sit as one group on the council.

While the elections in Paris and Lyon went reasonably smoothly, there was a very different situation in Marseille. Again, here a broad ecologist-led alliance - Printemps Marseillais - won the second round across the cité phocéenne, but this time the results in the individual sectors made the outcome of the third round rather less obvious. Printemps Marseillais, led by ‘l’inconnue’ Michèle Rubirola, took 40% of the city-wide vote, but this played out rather differently on the ground. Figure 3, below, is a map I found via Wikimedia Commons, put together by a gamer called Jules Rohault. You can find out about him here. I have also added below the Le Monde map for purposes of comparison with the results in Paris and Lyon. The secteurs in Marseille refer to the pairings of the 16 arrondissements.

Figure 3 - The fall of the cards in Marseille

Figure 4 - The electoral map of Marseille 2020, by Le Monde’s Les Décodeurs team

Both maps underline a number of factors in play in Marseille. First is the closeness of the result when it is broken down by sector and the division of Marseille, as much as Paris, into a city of left- and right-voting areas. Second is the presence of the far-right Rassemblement National, which took 19% in the first round and 20% in the second, but not always in the same way in different sectors. Third is the strength of the dissident Socialist senator Samia Ghali up in the 8th sector (referred to in the Le Monde map as divers gauche), whose list saw off the RN there.

Thus, despite clearly leading across the city, Rubirola was by no means a shoo-in for the hôtel de ville and a great deal would depend on the attitude of Ghali on the one hand and the far-rght on the other - and whether Les Républicains would countenance any sort of deal with them. Historically and generally speaking, the French right has been resolute in not seeking the support of the FN/RN, though there have been cracks in the edifice from time-to-time. By the same token, the far-right has generally rejected any form of alliance, but the last few years have seen unprecedented bridgeheads springing up from both sides. And in the week between the second round and the election of the mayor, rumours and counter-rumours of a union des droites to take down the left were certainly doing the rounds, though both sides and even individual figures seemed to contradict themselves repeatedly.

The closeness of the situation also saw a rather odd moment when Martine Vassal, head of the LR list throughout the campaign, announced that she would not be running for mayor. Vassal is a controversial figure to be sure and the local LR has been mired in accusations of electoral fraud, so it might be thought she had stood aside for someone who was more of a rassembleur and would continue as the power behind the throne as one of the senior adjointes. There was something in this, but in purely practical terms, Vassal recognised that, given the closeness of the vote, if the result were tied, she would lose out to Rubirola by virtue of the fact that in France, in the event of a tie, the elder candidate prevails. Rubirola was born in 1956, Vassal in 1962, so she stood down in favour of Guy Teissier, born 1945.

As in Lyon, so the election of the mayor of Marseille took place on Saturday 4 July. The election of the mayor can take up to three rounds. The first or second round can only be won by absolute majority, but a relative majority is sufficient in the third.

The election itself is chaired by the eldest member of the assembly, the doyenne or the doyen d’âge. Ordinarily, this would have been the 75 year-old Teissier, but as candidate for mayor, he withdrew and the sitting was chaired by one of Samia Ghali’s group, Marguerite Pasquini. Scarcely before Pasquini had been able to bring the meeting to order, the RN senator Stéphane Ravier, embittered at losing the 7th sector to Les Républicains, broke the rules of the assembly by taking the floor and announcing that he and his fellow RN councillors would not participate in the vote. They promptly left the chamber to do a round of media interviews about the flouting of democracy etc in typical populist style.

This, of course, meant that there could be no union des droites and more or less removed any doubt about the ultimate outcome. Nevertheless, Samia Ghali, who ahead of the election had tried to leverage her votes into the post of première adjointe, insisted on throwing her hat into the ring.

By the end of the first round, Rubirola had 42 votes, Teissier 41 (the LR group plus the two non-aligned divers droite councillors), Ghali eight. Teissier had nowhere left to go, but there then followed several hours of negotiations as Ghali tried to cash-in her support of Rubirola. Ravier’s flounce had really taken all the drama from the scene, but Ghali still clung on to the hope of exercising some role within the new majority. What deal, if any was struck, will only emerge in the days to come, but at the end of six long hours at the risk of being abandoned by her own supporters and under pressure from Pasquini, Gahli withdrew and Rubirola was duly elected as the first woman to be mayor of Marseille, bringing down the curtain on 25 years of right-wing government of the city under Jean-Claude Gaudin. Like Collomb in Lyon, Gaudin was on hand to hang the mayoral sash around the shoulders of his successor, protocole oblige.

For Rubirola, the reality of governing France’s second city while holding together a disparate and diffuse left-wing coalition will soon begin to bite. For Vassal, on the other hand, the disappointments of Marseille will probably be soothed with the chair of the Aix-Marseille-Provence authority. Sometimes democracy can be cruel.

Note added on 9 July -Vassal has indeed been elected to the chair of the Aix-Marseille authority.