As President Macron and President Trump stood side by side during the Bastille Day ceremonies in Paris, it was not difficult for commentators to point out the differences between the two men. Neither in personal style nor substantive policies do they have much in common. Indeed, Macron’s victory in early May was seen by most as a firm and critical rejection of Trump-style politics by a major Western country. But Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron do in fact share one very important characteristic: They were both candidates who came seemingly out of nowhere and who owe their victories in no small measure to a selection system that has reduced the sway of traditional party structures and allowed them to take advantage of fractures within the parties.
While the French have been intrigued by the drama of American presidential primaries for decades, the use of an open primary to choose a candidate is relatively new there. Its ultimate adoption was tied to the example of Barack Obama’s 2008 run for the Oval Office and his successful primary campaign waged against favored Hillary Clinton. Taking note of the Obama team’s grassroots efforts and digital strategy to expand partisan recruitment, the newly formed French think tank Terra Nova dreamed of creating similar conditions, to produce “un Barack Obama français.”
With this goal in mind, Terra Nova organized a trip to Washington in early 2009 for Socialist party politicians and operatives, meeting Obama campaign staff and strategists from the Center for American Progress. Former governor and insurgent presidential candidate Howard Dean that same year held a meeting for progressives in Paris, passing along the “secret” of Democratic strategy for expanding numbers among its electorate: Get volunteers to participate in primary campaigns.
With its August 2008 report “Pour une primaire à la Française,” Terra Nova had already proposed adoption of an open primary. It argued that such a reform was more than politically expedient. Adopting an open primary system was the natural outgrowth of a central feature of the Fifth Republic, the French practice of direct election of the president—a practice established by Charles de Gaulle in 1962 as a way to work around perceived political paralysis and cement the institutional strength of the executive against the power of the National Assembly. If it was the right of the French people to choose their president, it stood to reason that it was also their right to choose who the candidates for that office would be. The primary system would finally align party rules with the French presidential regime—or so it was argued.
Constitutional theories aside, the Socialists also believed that in advance of the 2012 presidential election, an open primary system would boost their electoral chances. The French left was worried that shared socioeconomic interests could no longer be counted on to rally a majority to their candidate, requiring them to stitch together a broader agenda of “cultural, progressive values” cutting across particular groups such as women, young people, minorities, and the highly educated, much as Obama did in the United States. Targeting these groups would produce new or reengaged voters for the party, but only if they were given a further role in the electoral process.
But even as outside political and social realities seemed to be rendering the traditional Socialist platform less relevant, paralyzing internal party politics were likewise propelling the Socialists towards an open primary as a permanent feature. After Lionel Jospin lost his bid to succeed President François Mitterrand in 1995, Socialist party officials had struggled to pick a party leader or a winning presidential candidate. In 2006, Ségolène Royal emerged victorious in an ad-hoc Socialist primary, hastily put together when the party could not reach a consensus over which of the two leading candidates, Dominique Strauss-Kahn or Laurent Fabius, should be chosen.
Employing a media-centric campaign, the relatively unknown Royal entered the race and won the Socialist-only primary. But in the wake of her loss to Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, and Obama’s victory in 2008, the Socialists doubled down on their commitment to the primary system, adopting rules to open their primary not only to party members but to all “adherents” (members of other left-wing parties) and to members of the general public who were registered in the French electoral lists. To vote, all one had to do was make a minimum contribution of one euro and sign a statement affirming the values of the left: “freedom, equality, fraternity, secularism, justice, solidarity and progress.”
Though not the initial favorite, François Hollande won the first open Socialist primary in 2011, out of a field of six candidates. He took advantage of the scandals sinking Strauss-Kahn and veered sharply to the populist left, posing as the adversary of “the world of finance.” Hollande’s strategy was given a considerable lift when Terra Nova’s prediction that an open primary would increase electoral participation came true: Approximately 2.5 million people cast ballots in the 2011 primary, more than a tenfold increase over 2006. His primary win was credited with giving him a popular boost that extended well beyond Socialist circles and helped produce his presidential victory. “The primary gave [Hollande] the aura of a winner, which he never had before,” a party official noted—and thus the notion of a “primary premium” took hold within French politics.
Meanwhile, the internal divisions of the French center-right party, the Union for a Popular Movement or UMP—soon to become les Républicains—were also leading them to the logic of the “primary premium.” The divisions had stemmed from Sarkozy’s 2012 loss to Hollande and his subsequent retirement from public life. Sarkozy reentered public life in 2014, sensing another shot at the presidency in the combined circumstances of a deeply unpopular President Hollande and the general disarray within the political right. But Sarkozy’s maneuvers ran into demands by competing party leaders Alain Juppé and François Fillon for an open primary selection system. Both believed that Sarkozy’s sway over the party’s machinery would prevent a fair race.
Sarkozy initially resisted the demands. But absent the broad consensus he had enjoyed when he previously captured the party’s nomination, and confronted with the serious challenge posed by Juppé and Fillon, Sarkozy could hardly refuse letting a wider electorate have its say. Moreover, there was now the prospect of obtaining the same kind of “primary premium” that had helped propel Hollande to victory in the general election. Sarkozy capitulated and agreed that the Républicains would also hold their first open primary. The stakes were high: Most observers believed that whoever won this primary would win the French presidency in 2017.
The Républicains’ primary was officially called the primary of “the Right and Center.” No party membership card was required, though participants had to provide their name and address, pay a token two euros, and, like voters on the left, sign a statement that they shared the “political values of the Right and Center.” Each potential candidate had to obtain the support of 20 members of the National Assembly, 2,500 party members, and 250 elected representatives to appear on the ballot. Meeting this relatively low bar, seven candidates appeared on the ballots on November 20, 2016, the first stage of the two-stage primary.
After four million votes were cast, Fillon had come out on top. Seemingly copying Hollande’s strategy from 2011 by campaigning further to his party’s extreme than what his political history would have suggested, Fillon ran as a Thatcherite-style reformer and took more than 44 percent of the primary vote, with Sarkozy coming in a distant third at 21 percent. In the second round of voting, Fillon won two to one over Juppé. The right’s primary experiment thus produced a candidate representing the most rightward edge of the coalition.
This drift towards the extremes was reflected in the left’s primary as well. Ordinarily, the Socialists would not have held a presidential primary when the sitting president was of their party. But with Hollande’s approval within the party at an all-time low and in single digits nationally, he had little choice but to agree to a primary contest before ultimately deciding to bow out of the race altogether—becoming the first presidential incumbent in the Fifth Republic not to run for reelection. After two rounds of primary voting in January 2017, the left’s candidate was the hard-left Benoît Hamon, whose signature proposals were adopting a 32-hour workweek, instituting a universal basic income, and legalizing cannabis.
Emmanuel Macron, a former Hollande minister responsible for several of the president’s unpopular reforms, had no chance of winning the left’s primary. But he judged that with the two traditional parties simultaneously veering further right and left, there was room to capture the middle. Macron’s assessment of this moment in French politics in fact ran deeper than that. He suggested that France’s traditional political division of right and left, whose roots arguably reached back to 1789 and the French Revolution, had collapsed into irrelevancy in the face of modern technology and globalism. He was certain that the contemporary political ideological divide rested on the fault line between those in favor of globalism, trade, markets, an open society, and “more Europe” and their opposites—nationalists advocating protectionism, both culturally and in trade.
He also thought that France’s political problems were bound up with the lost “mystique” of the presidential office. De Gaulle filled that void only for a time through his outsized personality and political style. The suggestion was that the leadership of France’s president needed to be as much about the particular officeholder’s charisma as it was about the nominal authorities of the office.
Macron gambled that the new open primaries were the death rattle of the traditional parties rather than a resuscitation of them, and that by moving to the extremes of the political spectrum, both left and right were creating the conditions for a new movement “above parties” to take hold in the political center. Tellingly, he founded his own movement—not a political party—to back his presidential bid. He remained vague about how exactly he would overcome the tensions between the center-right and center-left where his would-be majority lay. As a result, his campaign was as much about the person Macron as about his campaign pledges.
The presidential election confirmed Macron’s intuition about the state of France’s parties: No candidate from a traditional party advanced to the second round of voting. But it was not his political acuity alone that propelled Macron to victory—he was immensely helped by the late-breaking financial scandal that neutralized Fillon. This left Macron to face the hyper-populist Marine Le Pen of the National Front, whom Macron easily defeated, as the French political class and the voting public rallied to him in their determination to defeat her.
Opposition to Le Pen is, however, only half a program. Now an official party, Macron’s En Marche! movement won an absolute majority in the National Assembly elections in mid-June. Its task will be to turn oxymoronic characterizations of the party as representing the “radical center” or as a “progressive party of both the right and the left” into coherent policies. The new French president’s charisma may indeed assist him in moving policies forward but how far and how long it will carry him is another question. The fact that French citizens abstained from voting in the legislative elections at a nearly 60-year high suggests Macron and his movement’s victory rests on shaky ground.
More deeply, if the hope in adopting open primaries was to sidestep the parties’ internal squabbling and leadership fights, their adoption—as in the United States—appears to have just given these fights more public space in which to play out. And in another similarity to America, instead of energizing the body politic, the rise of the primaries seems to have left the French voting public even more discontented with their choices.
For the time being, this might not make much difference. But it is far too early to conclude that the current state of French politics will result in effective, sustained, and sound governance. The French would do well to keep in mind that the electoral system that made an Obama presidency possible is the same one that gave the United States Donald Trump.
Gary Schmitt and Rebecca Burgess are, respectively, director and program manager of the American Enterprise Institute’s
Program on American Citizenship.
