4 France: the model case of party system transformation
SIMON BORNSCHIER
Introduction
France clearly is one of the countries whose political landscape has been profoundly altered in
the past two decades. Although organizational stability has never been a defining feature of the
French party system, the new institutions of the Fifth Republic established in 1958 did
progressively bring about a more stable pattern of ‘bipolar multipart- ism’ (Parodi 1989; Knapp
2002). Since the early 1980s, however, cultural conflicts related to the different conceptions of
norms that should be binding in society, of the way community is conceived, and of the balance of
power between the nation-state and the European Union have emerged. The appearance of
these issues on the political agenda, and the rising prominence of an integration–demarcation
line of conflict lie at the heart of the transformation of the French party system that took place in
the 1980s and 1990s.
As a driving force of this transformation, and as one of the most successful right-wing populist
parties, the French Front National repre- sents something like the ‘prototype’ or the ‘avant-garde’
of a new party family. Earlier than in other countries, the extreme populist right achieved its
electoral breakthrough in a number of second-order elec- tions in the early 1980s. According to
our theoretical framework, the early success of the Front National in comparative terms must be
analyzed in the context of the country-specific political potentials and context structures. And, in
fact, the rise of the political formation founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen owes a lot to the
rather sudden decline in salience of the traditional cleavages and to a subsequent realignment in
the country’s party system that took place in the early 1980s (Martin 2000; Perrineau 1997).
The evidence presented in this chapter strongly rejects Kitschelt’s (1995) influential claim that the
Front National represents the master- case of a new type of radical right-wing party by virtue of
the
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combination of an authoritarian and a pro-market appeal. Far from being consistently neo-liberal
in the economic domain, the Front National in the 1990s in fact turned to a programmatic stance
suitable to mobilizing those left behind by the structural transformations of the last decades.
Denouncing globalization and European integration, and in 1996 even chanting slogans such as
‘le social, c’est le Front National’ (Perrineau 1997: 88; Betz 2004), the Front National has moved
to a position of economic, as well as cultural, demarcation. As a conse- quence, a triangular
structure of oppositions has emerged.
At the same time, the 1990s have seen transformations within the French party system that reach
beyond the emergence of this triangu- lar pattern. First of all, the process of European integration
has had a profound impact on party competition, producing a fissure both within the parties of the
left, as well as within the right. It has been the failure of the European Constitutional treaty to gain
majority support that has strikingly brought to the fore the simple truth that voters are strongly
divided in their attitudes towards the integration project. Secondly, the stability of the three-block
model is misleading in the light of a growing fragmentation of the French party system. In 2002,
the number of candidacies reached unprecedented levels in the elections of that year, resulting in
Chirac standing against Le Pen in the second round of the presidential contest. In that election,
the integration–demarcation opposition has become the prime political organizing criterion.
Following the general plan adopted in this book, this chapter begins with a discussion of the
economic, cultural and political context factors relevant to the transformation of the French party
system. Here, the waning of the established cleavages, the repositioning of the Gaullist RPR
(now UMP), and the rise of the European integration question emerge as critical determinants of
the changes affecting the French party system. We then proceed to a comparative analysis of the
positions of parties and voters in the transformed political space between 1978 and 2002. The
analysis reveals a transformation of the cultural divide between 1978 and 1988, the years where
the issues of immigration and security rose to unprecedented importance. In the same time
period, the Front National has become durably entrenched in the party system, mobilizing an
electorate that is clearly distinct from the others by virtue of its position at the demarcation pole of
