Last month’s French municipal elections were eagerly awaited for any sign they might give about where the country’s politics were heading, a year before the next presidential election.
For some time France has been portrayed as deeply divided and polarised.
One of the few clear outcomes of March’s polls was that division and polarisation are indeed very evident, but how far this enables anyone to judge what will happen in a year’s time is not so obvious.
The municipal elections had the odd loser, but no clear winner.
Not only is France divided, but the various wings of political ideology are deeply factionalised.
Fragmented political landscape
This has long been so on the right, with the Rassemblement National (RN) forging a path far from that of the main conservative party, Les Républicains.
But it is now true on the left, with the Parti Socialiste (PS), La France Insoumise (LFI) and the Greens having serious differences with each other in certain locations, while trying to form alliances in others to beat the right. They did not entirely succeed.
The hard right made some progress and, so far as any party could claim it did well, the RN was that party.
However, its main success came via an ally rather than the party itself, when Eric Ciotti won Nice (Alpes-Maritimes), the country’s fifth biggest city.
Otherwise, the party won mainly medium-sized and small towns, failing to capture bigger targets such as Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhône), Toulon (Var) and Nîmes (Gard).
The problem was not least what Marine Le Pen experienced in the last presidential poll – that an election fought over two rounds allows the electorate to take a view after round one, and vote tactically in round two.
Nothing happened in these elections to dilute the assumption that the RN has its best chance ever of winning a presidential election next year, whether its candidate is Jordan Bardella (as seems more likely) or Ms Le Pen.
However, that is far from the same thing as actually winning it, and a tactical vote could well, once more, be the party’s undoing.
That is, unless disgust with the traditional French parties is so profound that nothing can stop a radical break with the past by electing the RN.
A major clue as to whom the RN may have to beat came from the result in Le Havre (Seine-Maritime), where former prime minister Edouard Philippe won a new term as mayor.
The president he served was Emmanuel Macron, but Mr Philippe was also a stalwart of his previous party, Les Républicains.
He is centre, or possibly even centre-right, in his politics, which means that if he did reach the second round against an RN candidate, the left would, effectively, be disenfranchised.
At that point, if history is any guide, many of those voters would choose to support Mr Philippe. The margin would not be nearly so large, but think back to 2002, when Jacques Chirac defeated Jean-Marie Le Pen by 82% to 18%.
When the left have no candidate of their own to back, they tend to vote against the candidate perceived as further to the right.
Uncertain path to 2027
Elsewhere on the centre and the left, the news was not so promising.
Supporters of Mr Macron won Bordeaux (Gironde), evicting the Greens from power; and they also picked up Annecy (Haute-Savoie).
But the President also backed the prominent former minister Rachida Dati in her campaign to become mayor of Paris, and to break a quarter-century of socialist rule in the capital.
Thanks to some alliances forged after the first round, Ms Dati was talked up as having a real chance in the final poll, but she lost convincingly to Emmanuel Grégoire of the PS.
Mr Macron also backed the charismatic businessman Jean-Michel Aulas to win Lyon, and he lost narrowly.
Another former prime minister and notable centrist, François Bayrou, lost in his long-time fiefdom of Pau (Pyrénées-Atlantiques). It looks as though his political career is over, and his demise is rather indicative of how the French electorate seems to feel about non-ideological, or perhaps even non-extreme, politics these days.
A month before the election, the LFI appeared to be achieving pariah status because of the role some of its activists allegedly played in the murder of a far-right rival. Nevertheless, the LFI won councils in some depressed areas such as Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis) and Roubaix (Nord).
However, the LFI and the PS teamed up in Toulouse (Haute-Garonne) and Limoges (Haute-Vienne) and still lost.
Other leftist alliances tried to win Clermont-Ferrand (Puy-de-Dôme) and Brest (Finistère), and failed.
The Greens lost not just Bordeaux, but also Strasbourg (Bas-Rhin).
Their victories in Lyon and Grenoble (Isère) came only through local pacts with LFI.
Generally, however, it appears that the right and, to an extent, the centre did better overall in the elections than the left. This suggests that a right-of-centre candidate is far more likely to win the presidency than a left-of-centre one.
With no clear favourite, however, the fight that is now starting and will run throughout the next year could yet become pretty ugly.
In the aftermath of March’s elections, Mr Bardella said that the RN had “achieved the greatest breakthrough in its entire history”.
He would say that, of course, but he was not entirely making it up.
What we also cannot be sure about is that the present Assemblée nationale will survive until the 2027 presidential elections.
Were the government to fall in the next few months – which is more than possible – Mr Macron could call further parliamentary elections, with entirely unpredictable consequences.
At the moment, French politics seems to suggest that if and when there is a strong and stable administration again, it needs to consider rebuilding the country’s constitution from the bottom up.
Perhaps there will even be a candidate who runs next year on a promise of creating the Sixth Republic.
