France's "snap" legislative elections are a warning

The likelihood that extremist parties on the right and left will gain at the expense of the middle illustrates with hyper-polarization necessitates electoral reform.

France is facing a political crisis that it could have avoided if it had adopted an electoral system of the type advocated by its most prominent theorist of electoral system design, the eighteenth-century mathematician and philosopher Marquis de Condorcet.

On June 9, less than two weeks ago, French president Emmanuel Macron triggered snap elections for seats in the National Assembly, France’s legislature. The first round of these legislative elections is Sunday, June 30, about a week from now. A second round follows one week later, on July 7.

Macron made this precipitous move because of the dismal performance of his centrist political coalition in the June 9 elections for seats in the European Union’s parliament. Macron’s coalition was trounced by National Rally, the far-right party led by Marine Le Pen. National Rally received the largest plurality of French votes in the EU legislative elections, over 30%, which was more than double the percentage received by Macron-aligned candidates. Left-wing candidates came in third place, with smaller groups trailing even further behind.

Macron’s move surprised many, including other leaders within his own party. There’s been much speculation in the press about why he made this gamble, given his party’s current unpopularity.  One theory is that Macron wants to call the far right’s bluff: while populist Le Pen attacks the “establishment” in much the same way that Donald Trump does, if Le Pen’s party is actually required to govern as a result of victories in the imminent National Assembly elections, the public will sour on the far right as much as it has soured on the centrists.

Whatever the merits of that reasoning might be, it does not appear that French voters will balk at giving Le Pen’s party a chance to govern. Current opinion polls show Le Pen’s National Rally in the lead with about one-third of the vote. Moreover, Macron’s centrist party no longer is in second place, but is now running behind a coalition of parties on the left, which is polling at 28%, with Macron’s coalition at 18%.

Of course, it will not be settled what percentage of National Assembly seats Le Pen’s party will control until after the second round of voting on July 7. And because France does not use proportional representation for its National Assembly elections, the percentage of seats that any party wins is not determined by the party’s relative strength nationwide but instead by its relative strength in each of France’s 577 legislative constituencies (or districts, to use a term more familiar to Americans). Nonetheless, there is a serious chance that Le Pen’s party could end up winning a majority of seats—or at least become the dominant partner in a legislative coalition controlling a majority of seats.

This possibility has caused a political earthquake in France. The idea that a far-right party could govern France for the first time since the Vichy regime during World War II is an anathema to many on the left—and even to many on the center-right in the tradition of Charles De Gaulle and Jacques Chirac. Indeed, a schism has formed within the dwindling traditional center-right party over whether or not to form an alliance with Le Pen’s National Rally.

The problem that France faces is one of acute political polarization similar to what is occurring in the United States (and other Western democracies). Le Pen and her party used to be an inconsequential fringe. Most French voters on the right used to be close to the center of the political spectrum, perhaps on the 40- or 45-yard line (to invoke an American football analogy). But now with polarization moving voters towards the poles of the political spectrum, voters on the right are much closer to the end zone (maybe around the 20-yard line).

Nor is polarization asymmetrical in France in the way that it has been in the United States. On the contrary, the left has become polarized in France, arguably as much as the right. During François Mitterrand’s presidency (1981-1995), and even during François Hollande’s (2012-2017), the French left was center-left—at the 40- or 45-yard line, on the other side of the field. Since then, however, the French left has become dominated by a much further-left party, La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), led by the populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

In 2017, despite this increasing polarization, Macron managed to achieve a victory for his own presidential campaign and lead his new centrist party to legislative victories. Since then, the position of Macron and his party has deteriorated significantly. He held on to a reelection victory in 2022, but his party suffered significant setbacks in the legislative elections that year as the popularity of both Le Pen on the left and Mélenchon on the right increased. 

Then came the drubbing of Macron’s party in this month’s EU elections, with the electorate even more polarized between Le Pen on the far-right and Mélenchon on the far-left. Currently, France has an eviscerated middle, with two strong movements at the far extremes of the political spectrum. It’s especially vexing problem of a lot of deep-red voters and a lot of deep-blue voters but comparatively few purple voters (to use American terminology)—or even purplish red or purplish blue voters close to the center of the spectrum.

This extreme polarization wouldn’t be such a problem if France had adopted the kind of electoral system that its preeminent electoral theorist Condorcet advocated during the Enlightenment. As readers of Common Ground Democracy know, an electoral system based on Condorcet’s principles elects a candidate whom a majority of voters prefer to each other candidate in the race.  Thus, a Condorcet-based electoral system would not let either the far right or the far left prevail as long as a majority of voters would prefer a centrist candidate, like Macron, over opponents on the far right, like Le Pen, or the far left, like Mélenchon.

To be sure, if evisceration of the center ever gets to the point where either the far right or the far left are preferred by a majority of voters against all other opponents, then a Condorcet-based system would elect that extreme candidate. It would be a situation in which more than 50% of the voters are at one extreme end of the spectrum, with all the remaining voters at the other extreme and no one (or virtually no one) left in the middle. When hyper-polarization reaches that ultimate point, not even a Condorcet-based electoral system can save the society from self-destruction. As Lincoln so eloquently warned Americans, a house divided against itself (at least to this complete extent) cannot stand.

But polarization in France, while increasingly extreme, has not (yet) led to complete evisceration of the center. Macron’s party is still polling at 18%, just under one-fifth of the electorate. Neither Le Pen’s party, at 33%, nor Mélenchon’s, at 28%, is close to having a majority. Consequently, in a Condorcet-based election where the constituency mirrors the electorate of France as a whole, a candidate from Macron’s party likely would defeat candidates from both Le Pen’s and Mélenchon’s parties. Given the left’s hatred of the right, and vice versa, especially on social identity issues like immigration, Macron’s centrist party would pick up support from the left against the right and pick up support from the right against the left.

In this way, the center would hold in a Condorcet-based system, even though only 20% of voters prefer Macron’s centrist party as their first choice. When the electorate is sharply divided in the way that France’s currently is, with strong pluralities (but not a majority) at each end of the spectrum, and relatively few voters remaining in the middle, a candidate from the middle is still a compromise choice that best reflects the overall preferences of the polarized electorate. More voters, including those on the left, prefer Macron’s party in the middle to Le Pen’s on the far right and more voters, including those on the right, prefer Macron’s party to Mélenchon’s on the far left.

A Condorcet-based electoral system finds the candidate whom different majority coalitions of voters prefer to each other alternative candidate. Different majorities converge upon the same compromise candidate as preferable to candidates from the parties on the extreme right or the extreme left. This property of identifying the candidate preferred by different converging majorities is why I believe that “Convergence Voting” is an appropriate name in the United States for the electoral concept that Condorcet articulated.

Some scholars of democracy would argue against electing a centrist candidate who is the first choice of only 20% of voters. Given the strong pluralities of voters supporting candidates on the left and the right, these scholars would contend that it is better to require those relatively few voters in the middle to make a choice between left and right, rather than to elect the centrist candidate as a compromise among all the preferences within the electorate. Don’t force most voters to settle for their second choice, the centrist, their argument goes. Instead, force the few centrist voters to settle for their second choice, left or right.

But France’s current predicament illustrates precisely why in the context of hyper-polarization it is better to have a Condorcet-based “Convergence Voting” system elect a compromise candidate from a low-plurality middle of the electorate, rather than elect an extreme candidate from one of the high-plurality ends of the spectrum.

If you force the 18% of French voters who support Macron’s party to choose between Le Pen’s and Mélenchon’s, you will end up with an extremist running France. Depending on your perspective, it could be the ultimate disaster of France being governed by the extreme right—or the extreme left. Either way, the extremist in charge will be someone adamantly opposed by a majority of the electorate, hardly a desirable outcome in terms of democratic theory and the concept of collective self-government.

Second-choice compromises are, by definition, less appealing than having your first-choice preference satisfied. But when an electorate is polarized so that no one’s first choice commands the support of a majority of voters, then electing a second-choice compromise supported by different converging majorities is a better way to achieve democracy than electing a second-choice extremist than no majority favors over a compromise centrist.

Putting the compromise centrist into office may help to bring the hyper-polarized electorate back towards some shared conception of the common good. This is why Condorcet-based “Convergence Voting” is a centripetalelectoral system, endeavoring to find common ground in a deeply divided society. By contrast, conventional electoral methods—like France currently has—tend to exacerbate divisions when a society is already polarized. An electoral method than forces the 20% of voters in the middle to choose between two extremes is a centrifugal system that literally pulls people apart, rather than bringing them together. And when the society is already dangerously polarized, as France currently is, a centrifugal electoral system tends to result in the kind of ultimately ungovernable “house divided” tragedy that Lincoln ominously—and accurately—predicted.

Therefore, let France’s current crisis be a lesson to us all. France could have, and should have, benefited from the wisdom of its own great thinker, Condorcet. But all great thinkers, like Condorcet, belong to all humanity. The United States, too, can benefit from his wisdom, and avoid the acute dangers of hyper-polarization, whether or not France does as well.