France will be holding a new kind of local government elections on March 22 and 29 –
elections départementales, or departmental elections; really the new name for revamped and reformed cantonal elections.
warning: this post is depressing
Cantons were created in 1789 and the map was changed in 1801. In 2013, about 60% of the 4,055 cantons were unchanged from 1801, with the only significant changes in the cantonal map over some 212 years being the division of urban areas into more cantons. As a result, the population disparities between the several cantons in the departments were massive – with the general rule being rural overrepresentation (by a lot) and urban underrepresentation. Elected general councils were created in 1833, and since 1848 the general councils have been elected by universal suffrage with one
conseiller général elected in each canton. The general councils gained significant power with the Defferre decentralization laws of 1982 – which, among other things, transferred executive powers from the centrally-appointed prefect to the president of the general council (elected by the general council).
Departments are currently responsible for: middle school (collèges) infrastructure and maintenance, culture (shared power), social assistance (organization and administration, including the RMI and RSA), healthcare (sanitation, family planning centres, maternal and child health centres), advice and approval for territorial planning, environment (shared power over water, protected zones; departmental plan on waste management), seaports (commercial or fishing), departmental roads, transportation (including school transportation) outside urban areas, a role in social housing and some security-related matters (road safety, fire, emergencies). The
clause de competence générale, created in 1982, abolished in 2010 and recreated in 2013, gives territorial collectivities like the department the power to intervene in all matters which they hold to be in the local public interest.
In May 2013, the PS government passed a law which repealed Sarkozy’s stillborn 2010 territorial reform (which would, basically, have merged the roles and offices of general and regional councillor into one, territorial councillor) and replaced the existing general council with departmental councils to be elected using a new electoral system. The 2013 law, as it relates to departments, led to two huge changes in the organization of that level of local government:
-Cantonal redistricting: Reducing the number of cantons in each department (except Paris, which has no cantons, and the single-department regions of Guyane and Martinique which are transitioning to a merged region-department type of administration which will take effect in 2016) by half (rounded up), cutting the number of cantons from 4,035 (excluding Paris) to 2,054. The population of each canton is supposed to be much closer to the departmental average, with a maximum deviation of 20% allowed (still quite large). However, the redistricting did not do anything to change the continued population disparities in the average cantonal population of each department.
Each department with a population between 150,000 and 500,000 is entitled to at least 13 cantons; each department with a population over 500,000 is entitled to at least 13 cantons. This led to the prefectural redistricting of each department concerned by the reform in 2014, a process fraught with controversy and often strong opposition from the general councils.
-Creation of the binôme: A novel new electoral system, presumably unique in the world. Each canton will now elect two, rather than one, members to the ‘departmental council’. These members will be elected as a ‘general ticket’ or binôme, composed of one man and one woman. Voters will have one vote, for a binôme. The conditions for winning are the same as they were for cantonal elections and the same as they are for legislative elections: 50%+1 of valid votes representing 25% of registered voters in the first round, qualification for the runoff set at 12.5% of registered voters OR the top two tickets, and a plurality of the votes in the second round. The government argued that the binôme would promote gender parity in departmental councils, given the very low level of women’s representation in the general councils.
Another major change is that departmental councils will now be renewed in their entirety every six years. In the past, general councillors were renewed by halves every 3 years (so general councillors, generally, served 6-year terms, term extensions notwithstanding).
Finally, a significant thing to point out for this election is that while all departmental councillors are going to be elected at once, the election excludes some important territories:
-As always, Paris, which is its own thing
-Created on January 1, 2015, the new Métropole de Lyon has the status of a métropole (a new category of intercommunal structure or EPCI created in 2010 and confirmed by the PS government’s 2014 intercommunal reform law, or
loi MAPTAM) but also – uniquely – the status of a territorial collectivity, since the Métropole de Lyon has the powers of a métropole and the powers of a department within its territory. It is governed by the Conseil de la métropole de Lyon, currently (until 2020) made up of indirectly elected delegates from the communes which make up the Métropole de Lyon. So, the Métropole de Lyon will not be voting this year; only what remains of the Rhône (or Nouveau Rhône as some call it now) – a very right-wing rump department of 471k people against the Métropole’s 1.3 million – will be voting.
-Guyane and Martinique are transitioning, since a 2010 referendum and a 2011 law, to a merged region-department administration whose assembly will be elected with the regional elections in December 2015.
Also, be warned that since this government is stupid and horrible when it comes to regional autonomy and territorial reform, there’s a possibility that these departmental councils won’t last for a long time: who knows how the right will decide to muck things up if/when they win in 2017; and Valls himself has mentioned several times that he’d like to abolish departments in the long-term, although he walked that back when he realized they need to amend the constitution to do that, so the latest idea might or might not be to abolish departmental councils in urban departments and keep them in rural ones. At any rate, a law currently being debated by Parliament, the so-called NOTRe law, would transfer several powers from departments to the regions (like roads, middle schools, transportation, departmental harbours and waste management), so they’d really be down to administrating social assistance. They should also re-abolish the
clause de competence générale – yes, the same thing that they re-created in 2013 after the right had abolished it
As for this year’s elections, it is going to be totally horrendous. It will be a well-deserved bloodbath of epic proportions for the PS, which has everything going against them: besides everybody hating them as usual; unlike in municipal elections where people have personal attachment to their mayor (and even that didn’t do anything for the PS) and/or vote on local issues, the creation of new cantons with a weird system means that nobody has any real ties to any local candidates and will be far more likely to vote on national issues (if, granted, they bother voting, which isn’t very likely). Also, it is very likely the PS’ gerrymandering will blow up in their faces: research has shown that these new bigger cantons will amplify the winners’ majorities in departmental councils, so expect a few departments where the left will be shut out entirely. To make things worse, the PS’ allies have, in good part, abandoned them – EELV has no national alliance, deciding its alliances at a local level, and in some cases (like Isère) it is allied with the FG/PG in left-wing alternative alliances to the PS. Also, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, the charmingly corrupt boss of the department, Jean-Noël Guérini, has set up his own party (Force du 13) and is continuing to troll the PS-13 in awesome fashion like he did so successfully in the municipal and senatorial elections in 2014, leaving the left there as a hot mess with a PS divided between
guérinistes and
anti-guérinistes and FG/EELV somewhere on the sidelines.
The FN, which is putting up candidates in a remarkable 93-95% of cantons, has led the silly ‘nationwide polling’ with about 28-30% against 25-28% for the UMP-UDI (who are not, mind you, allied everywhere) and about 18-20% for the PS or whatever. The very high likelihood of Panzergirl’s charming mix of neo-Nazi, neo-fascist, racist and whackjob candidates being the biggest party in France further complicates a very open-ended election. There’s even a non-negligible possibility that the FN could win departmental *presidencies* like Aisne, Pas-de-Calais, Var or Vaucluse (although Bompard’s fascists are complicating things for the FN there), which isn’t a big deal since departmental presidencies can’t really do anything important, but still.
The left’s bloodbath will be huge since the last cantonal elections were in 2008 and 2011, both left-wing landslides, so the left controls 59 departments to 41 for the right. The left, if things go really badly, could collapse to merely 20 departments. A Ouest-France article had a map (with several mistakes and issues) of which departments could switch.
