France: After election win, what course will Francois Hollande take?

2012-06-30 · first published in Links · 156 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

As credited on the page: “link to links.org.au”

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did. The original is still readable at Links: read it in full.

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June 24, 2012 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Following on the victory of Socialist Party candidate Francois Hollande in the May 6 French presidential election , legislative elections were held in two rounds on June 10 and 17. The results confirmed those of the presidential election, but with some particular features.

Only since 2002 have the presidential and legislative terms been harmonised. Previously the decision to hold legislative elections or not was the choice of an incoming president. Now it is automatic. This sequence tends to produce elections that are simply a prolongation of the presidential contest, leading to a marked bipolarisation. On one side there is a strong push to give the incoming president a majority. On the other side of the political spectrum there is a tendency to vote for the main opposition party to provide a counterweight. Other parties tend to be squeezed out in the process.