Political process

Universal suffrage at the age of 21 has existed in France since 1848 for men and since 1944 for women; the age of eligibility was lowered to 18 in 1974. Legislation enacted in the late 1990s penalizes political parties for failing to maintain sufficient parity between male and female candidates. Candidates for the National Assembly must receive a majority, not a plurality, of votes, and, if no candidate receives an absolute majority, then a second ballot is held the following week and the post is awarded to the plurality winner. Elections follow the model of single-member districts rather than proportional representation within a district. Two-phase voting is also used for the presidency, with the exception that, if an absolute majority is not reached after the first ballot, then only the two highest vote getters are considered for the second ballot, which is contested two weeks later.

Historically, French political parties have been both numerous and weak, which is generally accepted as the reason governments fell frequently before the advent of the Fifth Republic in 1958. Since then there has been a degree of streamlining, although, especially among centrist groups, parties are still poorly organized and highly personalized. Indeed, there have been many vicissitudes in the fortunes of the main parties since the late 1950s. In the 1960s and early ’70s, Charles de Gaulle’s centre-right party—first named Union for the New Republic (UNR) and later Rally for the Republic (RPR)—dominated the elections. After the election of the centrist Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to the presidency in 1974, the Gaullist party declined, while the centrists (from 1978 as the Union for French Democracy; UDF) and Socialists gained in strength. From 1981 and with the election of the Socialist president François Mitterrand, the Socialist Party became dominant, its gains being made primarily at the expense of the Communists. It was the first time since 1958 that the left had taken the leadership in French politics. While the Gaullists achieved a comeback with the appointment of Édouard Balladur as prime minister in 1993 and the election of Jacques Chirac as president in 1995, the Socialists regained control of the government during 1997–2002, when Lionel Jospin served as prime minister. In 2002 Chirac was reelected to the presidency under the coalition banner of the Union for Presidential Majority (UMP), decisively putting down Jean-Marie Le Pen of the far-right National Front, who had surprised many with his strong showing in the first round of balloting. The UMP retained control of the presidency and the government following the 2007 election of Nicolas Sarkozy, but it was swept from office by the Socialists in 2012. François Hollande defeated the incumbent Sarkozy in the presidential race, and the Socialist bloc captured a clear majority in the National Assembly.

The French party system has continued to display volatility, though less so than in the past. Because the dominance of the Gaullist party was relatively short-lived, with other groups from the centre eroding its strength, the parliamentary base of the governments of the centre-right shrank; this was especially so since the centrists remained a loose confederation of several groupings, each of which tended to adopt different tactics. The precarious nature of political balance was underscored by recent periods of cohabitation between presidents and prime ministers of opposing parties.