Support for Le Pen in France:two elections in trompe l’oeil

There is a comforting consensus among political commentators that the 2007 presidential election marked the end of Jean-Marie Le Pen as a force in French politics. The shock election of the Front National leader to the presidential run-off in 2002, by contrast, is explained as a surge in the Le Pen vote specific to the prevailing electoral conditions. This article challenges that interpretation of both elections. It shows that, despite Le Pen’s unforeseen success in 2002, there was no surge of support for him, and that despite Le Pen’s supposed collapse in 2007, he won close to 4 million votes while popular agreement with his ideas rose to its highest recorded level. The article concludes that Le Pen remains a powerful presence in French politics and that his supporters continue to constitute a large and highly influential constituency.

Popular politics and the Ukrainian presidential elections of 2005

Ukraine's Orange Revolution in 2004 upset the consensus amongst political scientists about Ukrainian voter behaviour, challenging the notion of voter passivity. Careful pre-election planning that anticipated falsification of the ballot brought protesters to Kyiv rapidly. Sustained and overwhelming pressure from protesters eventually forced through constitutional and electoral reforms that led to the democratic resolution of the crisis.

The Front National at the polls:transformational elections or the status quo reaffirmed?

There is a widespread sense that the Front National (FN) came of age in 2014 as a challenger for power in France. The municipal and European elections appeared to herald a transformation in the party's development and prospects, demonstrating its capacity to compete as a major player at subnational and supranational levels following strong performances at the national level in the presidential and legislative elections of 2012. This article takes a critical view of that assessment. It argues that the FN in 2014 made significant progress but that the apparent surge of support for the party in these elections belies fundamental weaknesses in the depth and range of its electoral capacities and in its prospects for transforming itself into a party of government. These weaknesses were again evident in the departmental elections of 2015, confirming that the FN has not succeeded in ending bipolarisation and imposing a genuinely tripartite structure on French politics. Far from being the 'first party of France' and 'at the gates of power', the FN is still consigned primarily to a role of spoiler, with its progression stalled by institutional obstacles, electoral limitations and a political containment which it remains powerless to overcome.

Arlette Laguiller:does the mainstay of the French political far-left enjoy linguistic parity with her male counterparts?

While language use has been argued to reflect gender asymmetry, increasing parity has been evidenced in official settings (Holmes, 2000; Dister and Moreau, 2006). Our hypothesis is that the French national press has developed a norm of equal linguistic treatment of men and women. In a corpus of articles from Libération, Le Monde, and Le Figaro, we examine the treatment of Arlette Laguiller, the female leader of the French extreme-left 'Worker's Struggle' Party (Lutte Ouvrière), during the run-up to the 2007 presidential elections. How Laguiller is referred to and described in comparison with her male counterparts evidences no asymmetry. Breaches to parity are only found in the right-wing Figaro newspaper. The ideological distance between the newspaper and the candidate suggests that power struggles are a primary source of asymmetrical treatments. The discursive functions of such treatments can be understood through an investigation based on a portable corpus linguistics methodology for the measure of discrimination. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.

Departmental elections and the changing landscape of French politics

The departmental elections of March 2015 redrew the French political landscape, setting the new terms of electoral competition in advance of the regional elections of December 2015 and, more critically, the presidential election of April–May 2017. These elections saw the far-right National Front (FN) come top in both rounds only to be outmanoeuvred by the mainstream parties and prevented from winning a single department. As a case study in vote–seat distortion, the elections highlighted a voting system effective in keeping the FN out of executive power but deficient in terms of democratic representation and inadequate as a response to the new tripartite realities of France's changing political landscape.