Despite receiving a 5 (yay!) on the AP Comparative Government test, I do not know enough about French politics to understand what is being discussed in news articles and on the radio. I have a pretty good understanding of the structure of French government, but I don’t know much about the various political parties and the public perception thereof. In particular, I’m interested in the parties on the right of the political spectrum. What are major center-right parties? What is the public perception of these parties? What is the public perception of the Front National and extreme left wing parties? Etc. Thanks in advance.
The two main center parties are the Socialist Party and the UMP (Center right) who are currently in power.
How are UMP perceived, well their guy Chirac won the last presidential election he’s in his second term), and he’s still pretty well liked. OTOH Nicolas Sarkozy who’s likely to be the next UMP leader (the previous guy, Alain Juppé, was recently convicted of some kind of financial shenanigans) tends to polarize opinions - a lot of people are angry about his ‘law and order’ (and possibly anti-immigration) stance. JP Raffarin, the current prime minister is mostly unpopular, and widely held to be the administration’s fall-guy, but there’s some kind of weird love triangle going on with Chirac, Sarkozy and Raffarin about who’s going to be the next big man in the Party. Sarkozy may be going places, he gets a lot of media exposure, and seems to like it, OTOH he’s pretty much of a ham, and not much of a uniter.
The Socialist Party recently kicked ass at the regional elections, so the future’s uncertain.
Heading farther left - les Verts, the Communist Party, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire and several other small groups that occasionally work as a coalition - they’re very much minority parties, though the Socialist Party courts them (like Greens and Democrats)
- Verts (greens) = Noël Mamère who recently got screen time for performing an illegal same gender wedding
- Olivier Besancenot is a lefty extremist who picked up a surprising number of votes at the last presidential election, Arlette Laguiller is a long-time old-style workers rights advocate (there was a recent brouhaha about who really pulls her strings)
Far right - Front National (20% of votes at the last presidential election), headed by Jean-Marie LePen and a FN splinter, MNR headed by Bruno Mégret, erstwhile Robin to LePen’s batman. LePen’s daughter Marina looks like being groomed to take over from him. LePen claims that "Je suis socialement à gauche, économiquement à droite et plus que jamais, nationalement de France." - left-leaning on social policy, right leaning on economic policy, France leaning on international policy (this might sound familiar to Americans). His constituency is heavily drawn from failing industrial regions, failing agricultural regions, taxi-drivers and tobacconists (as far as I can tell).
I guess what might be a little difficult to understand in the US is that while the far right is widely demonized as a dangerous racist authoritarian movement, the far left is seen as a little kooky-utopian, but basically good guys. In fact LePen’s platform probably wouldn’t seem too extreme to the US electorate, the exception to that being that his jingoistic nationalism overtly calls to racism rather than sticking to xenophobia, flag-waving and religious divisiveness as an American equivalent would.
Your mission, If you choose to accept it…
And a lot of people love him too seeing as compared to the current PM, he gives the impression of actually getting things to happen. And his recent promotion to Minister of Finance means that the 35-hour work week will be a thing of the past (Boo…Hisss…Boo)
So Asteroide pretty much gave it to you in a nutshell. In order to win the last election against the Left, the Right-oriented parties joined forces (except the UDF I think) whereas the Left were even more divided than ever. This meant that in the first round of voting where the field is cut down to 2 people, we were left with a choice between center-right (Chirac, someone who had to win to remain as Pressie and not be faced with fraud charges) and the far-right (Le Penn, who prefered that France had played the 1998 world-cup with only white players and lose rather than a white-black mix and win!).
When the people realised that a far-right crazy was in the final round for the Top Job they took to the streets in their thousands and Chirac got in with about 80% of the vote. An amazingly high % but better the devil you know I guess 