Primaries are a pretty new feature of the French political scene, and the primaries we have seen don't bear a strong resemblance to their American counterparts. There was indeed something called a primary in 1995 and again in 2006, both replete with debates, meetings and expensive dinners, but in neither case was there much question as to which candidate would be chosen. Unfortunately for the socialists, in the eyes of voters there wasn't much question as to which party they wanted in charge, either: both candidates, Lionel Jospin ('95) and Ségolène Royal ('06), were soundly defeated.

Things are different today. Sarkozy is impressively unpopular (more due to a badly-managed public image than poor performance, but that's another question), and the French left is, at least theoretically, in a position to do some electoral damage and maybe even take the presidency for the first time since the Mitterand era.

In response to this opportunity, the Socialist Party (PS) has done the following:

  • Put a majority of its eggs in the unsavory basket of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, only to have them crack open on the hard sidewalk of multiple public sex scandals;
  • Publicly aired dirty laundry from the deepest recesses of the PS camp;
  • Remained completely incapable of putting aside minor doctrinal and personal differences in an effort to manufacture political unity;
  • Wholly failed to produce a single electable candidate, and
  • Called for a primaire citoyenne ("citizens' primary") to let the voters decide which candidate will lose next spring's election.

Here's how it's gone down so far:

With everyone talking about how it was going to be a primary à l'américaine, PS honchos only borrowed part of the model. First of all, they kept the traditional French two-round system, meaning that the top two candidates from an initial election will face each other head-to-head one week later. A minor strategic mistake, perhaps—it's hard to keep voters' attention for that long, not to mention get them out to vote on not one but two Sundays—but no big deal, right? They're new at this.

The incomprehensible, stupefyingly dumb mistake, however, came when they decided to open up voting to all registered voters who "sympathize with the socialist cause." What? Isn't the practice of limiting participation to registered party members part of the very definition of a primary?? Predictably, rumors swirled that young Sarkozyists would swarm to voting booths across France and sabotage the primary by voting en masse for Jean-Michel Baylet, a far-left candidate with very little public presence and even less electability than the rest of the bunch. While this didn't happen, the PS decision to stake their official nomination process on the results of an open election was unpredictable and needlessly risky.

During the run up to the first round (9 October), political in-fighting got ugly, even by French standards. Candidate Ségolène Royal, the former life partner of primary favorite François Hollande and the mother of his four children—they were together for more than 30 years—insulted him publicly and in rather personal fashion ("just to listen to him talk is go to sleep, folks!", among other gems). Mud flew in all directions, undoing any progress that might have been made in "party" unity since the fall of Strauss-Kahn...unity which was, I think, the point of the primary in the first place, at least from a publicity point of view.

Even the elections themselves couldn't go by without controversy. In order to prevent any influence on evening voters, France has strict laws about releasing election results to the media: no one in France is allowed to publish any results until an agreed-upon hour after the polls are closed. (I guess if we did this in America, more West-coasters might have voted in the Reagan-Carter election...) In any case this is a nice thought, but in the modern age it's not too hard to use another country to get around such a law, and of course some election results are liable to be leaked by certain overseas media outlets. This diabolical practice has already soiled several French elections; it shouldn't even be news.

And so it came to be. Tweets emerging from Montreal—Twitter, now there's a reliable news source—named Martine Aubry, Hollande's closest rival in pre-primary polls, as the projected winner around 6 pm. Hollande, not even clever enough to see how the night was likely to unfold, immediately responded with a tongue-lashing for the premature tweeters, describing the leak as "completely abnormal" and saying that "if this result was indeed known before the official announcement, it should be nullified." Right.

Of course, after the official results revealed that he had won the first round in convincing fashion and would face Aubry in this Sunday's (16 October) runoff, Hollande quietly dropped the issue. C'mon...do we really want this guy to run for president?

(Funny side note: a third candidate, Manuel Valls, agreed with Hollande on the nullification of an Aubry victory in the event that said tweets were to be proven clairvoyant...doing so, of course, via his Twitter feed.)

Analysis

I don't think French political groups should hold primaries. Not that they couldn't fix up the comedy of errors that is this particular event and put on a decent primary: it's more a question of matching the selection process to the extant political system and not vice-versa. Primaries make a lot of sense on a two-party rig; they serve as a magic date on the election calendar, a climax to the major-party in-fighting from which the various players can recover, lick their wounds and then grudgingly lock elbows for the fight against the common adversary (Hilary Clinton might be the greatest living embodiment of this ideal—when people see her circling the globe as the stately diplomatic face of America, do they even remember how brutal that campaign was, how every democrat in America was polarized on the subject?).

The French political landscape, however, looks more like a stegosaurus than a bactrian camel: there is a complex system of shifting loyalties and tenuous alliances on both sides of the political spectrum here that make any attempt to unify the left or right under a single ideological umbrella look both extremely insincere and unrepresentative of political reality. Besides, I think it's a sign of strength and resiliency in the system when a French candidate loses favor within his or her party, re-emerges under a new party and challenges the people who just cut him or her out of the loop. Somebody seems to invent a new party like this every few years, and sometimes that new party goes on to wield significant power. This happens in America about once per century, and if organized primaries become the norm in France there is a chance that it could be like that here too.

Primaries are built for a two-party system, but France isn't.