HAUSER: Presidential elections: France versus America

While the fervor of the 2016 U.S. presidential election is dying down with Donald Trump as the president-elect, the French presidential election is starting to heat up for late April 2017. Like the United States, the French Republic is a democracy and the president is elected by winning over 50 percent of the vote. However, unlike the United States, there is no Electoral College system based on the départements or the régions, the equivalent of states. Instead, it is simply whoever wins the most votes against other candidates. This is not the only aspect where the French differ in their elections.

Unlike the two-party system founded in the United States, the French democracy resembles other European democracies with a multiparty system, in which parties have to band together in the end to gain majority in the legislative branch. Currently, there are three main parties that hold the majority of the seats: Parti Socialiste (Socialist Party), Les Républicains (The Republicans) and Front National (National Front). However, other small parties do hold seats in the legislative branch and are needed to make coalitions, such as Les Verts (The Greens) and Parti communiste français (French Communist Party). This means that during the presidential election, given the numerous candidates, there are usually two rounds of voting, because no candidate wins the 50 percent majority in the first round. The second round of voting is a runoff election between the top two finishers in the first round.

But just like in the United States, it is necessary for each party to nominate a candidate for the election, which is normally done through primary elections. Much like with the French presidential election, given the numerous candidates within each party, it is often necessary to do two rounds of primary voting in order to get a candidate to win more than 50 percent of the votes. The past two weeks here in France were the primaries for Les Républicains, the first round was a particularly unusual one.

François Fillon and Alain Juppé were the top two winners, so they passed on to the second round. Fillon, however, won 44 percent of the popular vote in the first round, an unusually high percentage. In addition, former French president and current president of the Republicans, Nicolas Sarkozy, failed to make it into the second round after finishing in third with nearly 21 percent of the popular vote. After winning the second round, Fillon now heads on to the presidential election in the spring, facing the candidates of the other parties, including Marine Le Pen for the Front National and the winner of the Parti Socialiste primary in January.

As an American watching the primaries unfold for these past two weeks, I learned quite a bit about how the French operate during election time. First of all, they are not as reliant on polls as we are in the United States. Polls are conducted given that the first round of voting can usually go multiple ways. Considering how close elections tend to be, the French are more inclined to just wait for the results. Also unlike the United States, France is almost entirely in one time zone, so all the polls close at once and the results get back relatively quickly, usually before 10 p.m. Furthermore, in the French primaries, there is a small two-euro voting fee in order to pay for the election. Since this is done by the parties, they are allowed to charge the small fee to make sure the party can pay for voting locations, organization of the vote-counting, etc. On the other hand, the national elections in late spring are free, so there will be no barriers to vote.

Another confusing aspect of the election stems from the terms. The terms “right” and “left” are swapped in France, so the liberal side is the right and the conservative is the left. Of course, the correlation between French and American political parties is far from exact.

Thus, lucky me gets to go through two elections during my time here in France. Now that Trump has taken hold of the U.S. presidency, I just have to wait and see who the French choose to work with him in the spring. Will it be his conservative friend, Le Pen, the more liberal Fillon or another candidate?