Some context on the French institutions and elections

France is a strange hybrid of a Presidential and a Parliamentary system. The President is elected directly by the population every 5 years (it used to be 7 years, but this was shortened in 2002) and has a lot of power - he chooses the prime minister, he can call for early parliamentary elections, and he has sole power to fill in a huge number of important positions in the administration, the judiciary and other. He is the Head of State and also, in normal times the head of the executive.

By normal times, I mean when he has a clear majority in Parliament: he chooses a prime minister from his side, who is formally the head of the government , but is often used as a lighting rod by the President, and he has a majority to vote his laws.

But the parliament can have a different majority, as has happened with increasing frequency in recent years (in 1986-88 and again in 1993-95 under Mitterrand and in 1997-2002 under Chirac). It's what's been called "cohabitation", as the two sides have to share power, but it's not really gridlock. In that case, the Prime Minister is chosen from the other side, and governs with the support of its majority in Parliament. The policies are clearly set by the Prime Minister, but the President keeps specific powers with regards to diplomacy, military affairs, and lots of domestic nominations - which thus require compromise between the two sides.

With the change in duration of the presidential mandate, the parliamentary elections take place right after the presidential ones, and that makes it most likely that the President gets a majority in parliament to support him/her (it's theoretically possible that he'd lose, but that has never happened in modern history)

You basically have one major party on each side, the UMP is right of center, while the Socialist Party is left-of-center (both would probably fit inside the Democratic Party in the US in terms of policies). Alongside the major party on each side, you have smaller parties  - the pro-European UDF and the nationalist UPF on the right, the Greens and the Communist Party and all the Trotskyist groups on the left. Some elections are base on proportional voting, and  some are based on two-round majority vote (the top two candidates in the first round face off in the second round). The two-round voting system used in parliamentary elections (held every 5 years) leads to fairly stable coalitions, as the losing candidates on each side in the first round call to vote for the leading "friendly" candidate.  In some cases, the parties on one side agree not to field candidates against one another in the first round to help candidates from smaller parties get some seats (for instance, the Socialists will have a national agreement with the Greens whereby they agree not to field candidates against the Greens in x winnable districts, thus ensuring that the Greens have seats in Parliament. In return, the Greens support socialist candidates elsewhere and, in some case, they formally agree to participate to government - as happened in 1997-2002.

Proportional voting, which is used for local elections (and de facto in the first round of the Presidential elections), allows the smaller parties to get political appointees at the local level, and to measure their relative representativity (thes results are then used to negotiate the share of "safe" seats in the parliamentary elections as described above).

Of course, this stable arrangement has been disrupted by Jean-Marie Le Pen's populist and racist National Front, which polls about 15% of the votes. It is formally on the right, but the mainstream right, to its credit, mostly refuses to ally with the NF candidates, and both the mainstream left and the mainstream right support the other side vs the NF if it ever gets to the second round in parliamentary or presidential - so the NF has almost never gotten seats in the Parliament. In 2002, Le Pen got to the second round of the Presidential election by coming a smidgen in front of Lionel Jospin, the Socialist Party candidate (it was Chirac 20%, Le Pen 17%, Jospin 16%)  - everybody thought that Jospin was a shoo in for the second round, and nobody bothered to vote for him in the first round...

Anyway, the system is fairly robust: allows for good representation of smaller parties at the local level but creates stable majorities to govern at the national level. There is an unresolved tension between the Presidential election and the parliamentary elections, as both provide political legitimacy and power and there are periodic calls to change the Constitution to clarify where power lies, but so far these are going nowhere.

In this context, the Socialist Party candidate, barring a disaster like in 2002, is the most likely representative of the left in the second round of the presidential election, and the choice yesterday thus was an important step  towards knowing if a lefty candidate has a chance to win next year, depending on both the likelihood of that candidate losing votes to smaller candidates in the first round and possibly not making it to the second round, and its chances of winning against the likely candidate of the right, Sarkozy (I won't go into details on Sarkozy right now, I'll have a diary later on that).

This time, the "guilt" after Jospin's elimination in 2002 makes it likely that the socialist candidate will get a lot of votes on the first round, but there are still a number of hard left candidates that will run: the communist, two trotskyists (the same as in 2002), the green and possibly Jean-Pierre Chevènement, a representative of the sovereignist left. Interestingly, on the basis of current announcements, 4 or the 6 candidates of the left will be women, including of course the front runner, Ségolène Royal.

But back to the race.

The candidates on the left

After the episode of the EU Constitution referendum, on which the party was deeply split, the socialist leadership decided in January this year to organize a transparent process to choose the candidate that would represent the party for the 2007 election. A number of potential candidates emerged, including the main leaders of the party (the "elephants", as they are called), along with others trying to test the waters, or to improve their visibility in intra-party fighting. 7 candidates announced or let it be known that they were planning to run (the 3 that did run in the end, see their bios below, along with Jack Lang, a popular former culture minister, Martine Aubry, the controversial author of the 35-hour working week laws, Lionel Jospin, the former Prime Minister and big loser of the 2002 election, as well as François Hollande, the party leader and partner in life of Ségolène Royaland father of their 4 children).

After various episodes which I'll spare you, only 3 candidates decided to run:

Laurent Fabius, who was prime minister under Mitterrand in 1984-86 (at age 38) has long been seen as one of the biggest "elephants" (as the senior leaders of the socialist party are called), and felt that this was his turn to run. He was finance minister in 1999-2002 under Prime Minister Jospin, and has long been the head of one of the influential factions within the party. Duting the 90s, he was tainted for quite a while by the contaminated blood scandal (hemophiles who received HIV-infested blood due to improper procedures at the national blood transfusion center in the mid-80s when he was prime minister) but was fully cleared in 1999. He used to be associated more with the centrist (social-liberal, or social democratic) wing of the party, and often mocked as part of the "gauche caviar" (caviar left, an even nastier French equivalent of the latte liberals)  but since he chose to back the "non" vote during the EU constitution referendum last year, he has reinvented himself as an unapologetic lefty. This is generally deemed to have been opportunistic (to differentiate himself from Dominique Strauss-Kahn) and not very credible, but he has stuck to his guns for the past 2 years. His strong support within the PS apparatus gave him the hope of finishing second and forcing Ségolène to fight a close second round if she did not win in the first round. He is widely seen as the most brilliant of the three. He is divorced.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn (known by his initials DSK) has long been in charge of economic issues in the PS, and was finance minister in 1997-1999, where he was seen by both business and pundits as doing an excellent job. He was forced to resign by a pseudo scandal for which he was fully cleared in 2001. He is seen as the most centrist of the candidates, as well as the most technocratic. He has run on an explicitly social-democratic platform, although he has not shied away from calling for the renationalisation of EDF, the power utility. He is generally popular, but his support inside the party is not very strong and he has often been seen as too much of a dilettante. He was also handicapped by the resentment of Lionel Jospin, the former prime minister, who was hoping to run in this primary, but needed Strauss-Kahn to get out of the way to give him a chance to appear desired and inevitable. As Jospin still has strong support within the party apparatus, manoeuvers to deny DSK votes and political oxygen have been suspected. He is divorced and remarried to Anne Sinclair, a popular TV anchor. He is also Jewish, something which is almost never mentioned as it is not a determining factor in any way in French politics.

Ségolène Royal has traditionally been more on the left of the party, but has surprised a number of people by more conservative positions on some issues, like her idea to set up military camps for young delinquants, or her repeated reference to "l'ordre juste" (fair order). She was briefly popular in the business press for criticizing the 35-hour work week laws until they realised that she was criticizing it for being too harsh on blue collar workers (which is actually true to some extent, as work hours were annualised and in some cases led to less regular work hours, or to more week-end or night time work for some). After working in Mitterrand's staff in the early 80S and holding several junior positions in leftwing cabinets, mostly on social policy remits (family affairs, education), she came to prominence in 2004 by beating rightwing prime minister Raffarin in the Poitou-Charentes regional elections and becoming the only female president of a regional council. The picture of her beaming smile on that election day was widely distributed. Since then, she has run a relentless media campaign to stay in the news, appear new and fresh and become inevitable and, despite many warnings (or wishes) that she would crash, she has not, and has demonstrated both a fierce determination to get her way, as well as a reasonable grasp of "serious" policy issues.

The campaign

The formal camapign lasted a few weeks only, during which several debates between the 3 candidates were organised in various cities in France, some of which to be played on TV and some taking place only in front of party members. That campaign was generally seen as a positive thing both for the party and the country, by encouraging public debate on many policy issues and showing a good example of transparent znd open democracy in action. In particular, the contrast with the right, where Nicolas Sarkozy has all but locked the official candidature of the UMP, the main rightwing party, of which he is the president, has been very favorable to the socialists. There have been a few nasty twists, as when Ségolène Royal was booed during one of the big debates (attributed to the supporters of DSK, who denies), or when a video of her suggesting that teachers should spend 35-hours per week in schools (instead of giving their 15-20 hours of classes and doing the rest of their work  elsewhere) was leaked on youtube to try to discredit her with teachers, an important contingent within socialist party members, but overall, the campaign was pretty clean and honorable.

Of course, that campaign was only the last stretch of the longer unofficial campaign that started earlier this year after this candidate selection mechanism was announced. Two things did more than anything to shape it: Ségolène Royal's early announcement that she would run, which triggered assive press coverage and a lot of genuine interest, and the decision by the party to open up its membership by allowing registration on the net, for a lowered fee of 20 euros, until early June, wit hthe clear intent that all the new members would be allowed to vote in the 'primary'. The party registered almost 70,000 new members, an increase of 50%, which created absolute uncertainty as to the results of the vote as these new members were totally unknown to the old-timers - and many remained so until the day of the vote.

Ségolène Royal's campaign was a media-savvy mix of common sense talk on bread and butter issues, finely calculated provocative declarations that generated debate on topics of her choosing, and a obvious play on the fact that she is a fairly young (she is 52) and attractive woman.  As  a mother of four and an ability to speak simply, focusing on basic issues like education and security, she connected with 'ordinary citizens' for which she managed to represent both modernity and change while giving the impression to care more than ordinary politicians about the plight of the lower classes. With her controversial (on the left) focus on law and order issues and a willingness to call for toughness against delinquent kids, she managed to give credibility to the left on a topic where it is often seen as naive or out of touch, while appearing softer than Sarkozy on the right (who has also axed his campaign on security and a change in generations, but who has appeared - quite properly, in my view - to be reactionary and heartless and has been pushed into the hard right as Ségolène Royal claimed the middle ground. With her website, Désirs d'avenir, she also broke new ground in French politics by explicitly calling for input from citizens, in the form of ideas, policy proposals and other commentary on the website, that was processed by her team and used for policy ideas. This was not exactly like dKos, as the site was moderated, but it did lead to lively debate.

Her ability to stay in the news, seen as a weakness, and which many on the left hoped would not translate into lasting popularitiy, did endure, cutting off the oxygen both to Sarkozy and to the other socialist candidates. The longer this lasted, the more crediblr she appeared, and polls began to shpow that she could beat Sarkozy in the presidential election. For the left, traumatized by the 2002 election when Le Pen came in front of Jospin, the ability to beat Sarkozy became an essential criteria and gave further impetus to her campaign, translating for the first time into support within the apparatus of the party in addition to overall popularity.

The official campaign changed little to these trends, but the whole process gives Royal, the clear winner, a lot of additional credibility, as she proved that she could hold out her own against two experienced politicians, and as she now has a clear mandate to be the candidate of the mainstream left. The Socialist party comes out enhanced by this exercise in netroots democracy