“If proportional representation is a solution, I don’t rule it out.” During his appearance on the TF1 news, the day after his appointment, the new Prime Minister Michel Barnier suggested that he could open this institutional project, which has become a real red herring in recent years. The idea of a proportional vote for the legislative elections was brought back to the forefront by the latest electoral sequence, which shattered the myth of stability attached to the single-member majority vote, which is nevertheless considered to be conducive to the establishment of clear majorities.
Proportional representation has long been demanded by several political parties. François Bayrou, the president of the MoDem, has made it one of his great hobby horses. “We should have changed the electoral law before a possible dissolution,” regretted the Béarnais in a recent interview with the newspaper Le Monde. He now proposes to have this electoral change adopted by means of a referendum.
To those who point out the risk of fragmentation inherent in proportional voting – while the current fragmentation of the political landscape is already unprecedented – François Bayrou opposes “a constructive approach.” According to him, the difficulty, or even the impossibility of gleaning an absolute majority with proportional voting would require, upstream, “to look at one’s competitors not only as adversaries, but as potential partners.”
Proportional representation in the legislative elections is included in the “legislature contract” presented by the New Popular Front. François Hollande had also proposed it in 2012, before giving up on it. Furthermore, the leniency shown so far by Marine Le Pen and the National Rally towards Michel Barnier could be linked to this issue. “If there are new legislative elections in a year, we could find ourselves in the same situation of total blockage as today,” believes the leader of the RN deputies in an interview with La Tribune du Dimanche. “We must therefore adopt another criterion, which allows a political force to have a majority and govern the country, while having a better representation of the currents that run through it.”
“500 kinds of proportional…”
In a single-member majority vote, only one candidate is elected, the one who comes out on top. This system rewards only the candidate who has collected the most votes, regardless of the score achieved by his opponents. Considered fairer, proportional representation takes into account the number of votes collected by each participant. While single-member representation tends to benefit large parties, capable of attracting the greatest number of voters, proportional representation also rewards the progress made by smaller parties, even if they have not come out on top.
But the main difficulty is to define its contours: there are in fact different ways of setting up this vote, and it is on this point that a possible reform of the electoral code could stumble. “Proportional voting is a way of freeing up French political life, it must be done by taking one’s time. It is not enough to say ‘proportional’, there are 500 types of proportional representation…”, points out Hervé Marseille, the president of the centrist group in the Senate.
Precedents in France
The only direct vote with full proportional representation in the French electoral system: the European elections. Voters vote for national lists. Each list having obtained at least 5% of the votes is allocated a number of seats proportional to its number of votes, within the limit of the number of seats that France has in the European Parliament, in this case 81.
To date, the experience of the 1986 legislative elections has remained without follow-up. In accordance with one of his campaign promises, President François Mitterrand introduced proportional representation for the 1986 legislative elections. The constituency map was merged with that of the departments: the number of deputies was set at one per 108,000 inhabitants, so that each department had to elect between 2 and 24 deputies according to its population. Only lists that had obtained more than 5% of the votes were admitted to the distribution of seats, a threshold supposed to limit too great a fragmentation of the political space. The distribution was made according to the order of the candidates on the list. The remaining unfilled seats were allocated according to a calculation method called “the highest average”.
At the time, the left was accused of electoral manipulation, and was criticized for wanting to promote the rise of the National Front to slow the progress of the RPR. But the maneuver was a bitter failure: although 35 National Front deputies entered the Palais Bourbon, the right nevertheless obtained the majority of votes and imposed cohabitation on the left. Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, anxious not to repeat the same mistake as his predecessors, hastened to reinstate the single-member majority vote, sometimes presented as a legacy of Gaullism. This did not prevent the socialists from winning the 1988 legislative elections by a narrow margin.
A dose of proportional representation has been integrated into the municipal elections for municipalities with more than 1,000 inhabitants. The list that comes out on top gets half of the seats to be distributed, with the rest being divided between the lists that won more than 5%.
The senatorial elections, a vote by indirect universal suffrage, also include a dose of proportional representation. In departments that elect three or more senators, the election is by proportional representation. Senators representing French people living outside France are also elected using this voting method. In September 2023, on the occasion of the last renewal by half of the Upper House, proportional representation was applied in 27 constituencies, or 136 seats out of the 170 that were up for grabs.
Proportional integral
On April 13, 2022, a few days before the second round of the presidential election, Emmanuel Macron said he was ready to go “as far as a full proportional system”, going further than the promise made in 2017 of “proportional representation in a measured manner”. Indirectly, the head of state is taking up the formula proposed in 1986: a distribution of all seats based on the score achieved by each political force. However, no bill was in the pipeline before the dissolution and the early legislative elections.
Former MoDem MP Patrick Mignola had already proposed it in 2021, in a text submitted to the National Assembly but never included on the agenda, although the elected official had called on the other components of the former presidential majority to take it up. Last April, the rebellious Bastien Lachaud also submitted a bill to this effect.
Full proportional representation also raises the question of the electoral map: should there be national lists, as for the European elections? The disappearance of constituencies would erase the local nature of the election, even if the deputies, invested with a national mandate, represent the entire Nation and not only their voters. Another possibility: returning to a departmental division, like what was imagined in 1986.
Partial proportional representation
Following the work launched at the beginning of the year by the National Assembly on the role of local elected representatives, Yaël Braun-Pivet, the president of the Lower House, had proposed to bring the voting method for deputies closer to that of senators, with the introduction of a dose of proportional representation in the most populated departments, i.e. those that elect at least 11 deputies. In total, 152 parliamentarians out of the 577 in the Palais Bourbon, or 26% of the seats, would be elected in this way.
“The introduction of a dose of proportional representation makes it possible to guarantee fair representation, while maintaining stability in governing and proximity of elected officials to their territory,” she justified in the columns of Le Figaro. Not very enthusiastic about the idea, the right has made it known that it would demand in return for such a reform a relaxation of the rule of non-accumulation of mandates. This is one of the constraints imposed by Gérard Larcher, the President of the Senate. Note that the “emergency legislative pact” presented at the beginning of the summer by the LR does not include institutional measures. This subject could therefore spice up relations between Michel Barnier and his own political family.
The “winner’s bonus”
Long in favour of full proportional representation, Marine Le Pen ended up proposing a hybrid system during the last presidential election, with the establishment of a “majority bonus” intended to guarantee a majority to the political party that came out on top in the election, a way of getting around the risk of parliamentary instability. According to the mechanism imagined by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter, only two-thirds of the seats (385) would be allocated to proportional representation, the last third, or 192 seats, would go to the party that came out on top, thus strengthening its base. Marine Le Pen had indicated, during a press conference on 12 April 2022, that she wanted to submit this electoral reform to a referendum to enshrine it in the Constitution.
With this system, to ensure an absolute majority, it would be enough to collect a little more than 25% of the votes. Let us recall that the RN won 37% of the votes in the second round of the early legislative elections, becoming the first party to sit in the Palais Bourbon with 126 deputies. In the event of a proportional vote, its score in the first round (33%), reduced to two-thirds of the hemicycle, would have allowed it to win 127 seats, a number immediately increased to 319 thanks to the “majority bonus” imagined by Marine Le Pen. Well beyond, therefore, the threshold of the absolute majority, set at 289 elected representatives.
Such a reform implies setting up a national election, unless the electoral map is completely redrawn to limit the number of constituencies to 385, the number of seats reserved for proportional representation. Which raises a question: according to what criteria does the political force that comes out on top award the seats linked to the “majority bonus”, which, a priori, are not linked to any constituency? “The technical modalities of the election: admission threshold, scope of the majority bonus, number of rounds, possibility of merging lists… will be subject to the law, which of course reserves a certain flexibility”, Marine Le Pen had indicated.
