Second Order No More: Europe in the 2019 EP Elections in France

• In Event: Identities in a Changing Europe

Abstract

For most of the forty-year period since the recasting of the European Parliament (EP) as a popularly elected body, European elections have been regarded in the literature as second-order elections. Positing that voters feel less concerned by their outcome than first-order contests in which national executives and/or legislative representatives are selected, thereby translating into high abstention rates and elevated scores for anti-system parties, this thesis stipulates that EP elections are contested around domestic political issues and the policy records of governing parties and officeholders, rather than European questions per se. This second-order election thesis has become increasingly difficult to sustain, however. Starting in the 1990s, studies have shown that European issues do in fact inform the choices of voters and help to explain their defection from governing parties in EP elections. By the same token, Europe has assumed a growing significance in national elections and emerged as a “first-order” issue in its own right. Europe’s electoral salience has become particularly pronounced in the aftermath of the 2010 debt crisis and the 2015 migrant crisis. These crises drove unprecedented support for Eurosceptic parties in the 2014 EP election and appear poised to do the same in 2019, with polls indicating that anti-EU parties are on course to make unprecedented gains in the latter. This would suggest that the debate over Europe has grown more entrenched in national politics than ever before.

France stands as a paradigmatic case of this post-second order evolution of European elections towards increasingly first order status. From the razor thin margin of approval in the September 1992 Maastricht Treaty referendum, to the outright refusal of the European Constitutional Treaty in the May 2005 referendum, to the increasing weight assumed by European issues in national elections, the country’s political trajectory over the previous three decades suggests the growing significance assumed by Europe in the domestic politics of EU member states. The 2017 presidential election specially reflected this trend, in which an avowed Europhile candidate defeated a professed Europhobe in order to win the presidency. The debate over France’s membership in the EU in general and the euro in particular was a central determinant of Emmanuel Macron’s victory over Marine Le Pen, with the former strongly identifying his presidency with the mandate of deepening the process of European integration. Yet, Macron’s convincing victory in 2017 failed to resolve the question of Europe in the French political debate. On the contrary, persistently anemic growth on the backdrop of painful structural reforms and austerity policies at home, combined with the inability to push Germany towards fuller fiscal and financial integration abroad, served to resurrect anti-Europe sentiment in the country. Accordingly, a December 2018 Ipsos survey indicated that the radically sovereignist Rassemblement National was poised, as in 2014, to win the 2019 EP elections while Eurosceptic parties that seek to break with the EU status quo enjoyed the support of over half (52%) of potential voters. Similarly, the continued momentum and popularity of the gilets jaunes movement, which has fueled the gravest political crisis faced by Macron since his election, attest to the depth of anti-establishment and anti-EU sentiment in France.

This paper analyzes the 2019 EP election campaign in France and interprets its outcome at both the domestic and EU levels. First, it tests the validity of the second-order election thesis by seeking to disaggregate domestic versus European factors in accounting for the election’s outcome. Analyzing their respective electoral programs in view of these elections, the paper first differentiates between Europhile parties that agree with and wish to deepen the EU’s present trajectory versus Eurosceptic parties that oppose it. A distinction is drawn among the latter between Europessimistic formations that agree with the concept of European integration but wish to see it pursued according to alternative economic and political principles and Europhobic parties that reject European integration outright. Secondly, the paper analyzes the election’s results from a comparative sociological and political perspective. Sociologically, it identifies the sectoral, class, geographic and spatial correlates of the vote for the principal party lists and relates them to broader trends across the EU. In turn, politically, the paper assesses the 2019 EP election’s significance at the national and European levels. Nationally, it analyzes how the debate over Europe is likely to shape French politics, notably the 2022 presidential and parliamentary elections. At the EU level, the paper considers how the election result in France fits into the partisan composition of the new EP and what this bodes for European governance.

Author

• Gabriel Goodliffe, Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico