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The 2024 French elections: a setback for gender equality in politics

Camille Barbe (Université de Bordeaux)

On 7 July 2024, France’s election results surprised commentators as it saw the leftist union (the New Popular Front) defy the opinion polls of the preceding weeks and arrive first place, with 182 seats in the new assembly.  This unexpected defeat for the far-right National Rally party was partly made possible by the union of a “republican front” and the support of leftist activists. Among them, many feminist activists called for a leftist union. While the results of the elections were certainly something to be celebrated in feminist circles, the overall result portends a worrying trend, the decline of the number of women in Parliament.

The proportion of women in Parliament has decreased 

The new legislature is composed of 577 French citizens elected to represent the nation. This decline marks two regrettable milestones in the search for gender equality in politics. The first one is that, for the first time since the adoption of gender quotas in France, the share of women MPs declined twice in a row. This downward trend for gender equality is all the more amplified when considering the state of the French Senate in this regard. Gender equality in the French Senate has always progressed more slowly than in the National Assembly, both as a result of its indirect voting system as well as its character as a more conservative chamber. The gender disparity between senators remains striking as the current Senate is composed of 126 women out of 348 senators.

Minimal legal obligations 

When trying to understand the reasons for this recent decline in the search for gender parity, multiple factors must be considered. The first one is the state of the legislation. After an early attempt to introduce a gender quota, the French Constitution was revised in 1999 in order to allow the implementation of gender balance rules in voting systems. As a result, the first article of the French Constitution provides: The law promotes equal access for women and men to electoral mandates, elected offices, as well as to professional and social responsibilities.” Following this constitutional change a law passed in 2000 created a diverse set of gender balance rules for all the elections in France. With regards to the legislative elections, the law sets out a mechanism destined to force parties to present the same number of men and women candidates. 

Unlike many European democracies, legislative elections in France don’t operate following the proportional system but with a  two-round majority system in each of the 577 constituencies. If a political party fails to present as many women as men candidates, they suffer a reduction of their public subsidies. Precisely, . While these sanctions have been increased over time, they have never been respected by the majority of political parties.

While the number of sanctions regarding the latest elections has not been established yet, trends can be observed when looking at the make-up of each party’s pool of candidates. For the 2024 elections, . The result is a National Assembly with a declining number of women and with a majority of political groups still mostly composed of men. Even the most gender-balanced political groups remain below the objective of equal participation. Despite having quite a balanced gender partition in their pool of candidates, the Rassemblement National only has 32.5% of women in their parliamentary group. This paradoxical result might be the result of “sacrificial lamb strategies” which consist in placing women candidates in constituencies where they have no chance of winning, in order to formally comply with gender balance rules without having to change the traditional make-up of their parliamentary group. 

An unforeseen dissolution

Despite the chronic weaknesses of the legal obligations regarding parity, they can’t be deemed totally responsible for the decrease in the number of women sitting in Parliament. On 9 June 2024, . The first round of the early elections was only two weeks after the announcement of the dissolution. This exceedingly short campaign was dominated by the search for political alliances in order to form a “republican front” to beat the far right. This urgency seemingly resulted in less attention being dedicated to the objective of parity which explains this decline in gender equality.

Will France’s next Prime Minister be a woman ?

Although policies regarding gender balance usually only target the Parliament, composing gender balanced governments is also key in fighting against the over-representation of men in politics. While there are no legal obligations. Nevertheless, there remains a gendered repartition of positions even in balanced governments, as women rarely occupy offices related to sovereign prerogatives. In the history of France, The New Popular Front, the leftist union, is currently debating over a Prime Minister candidate. The name of Huguette Belot, the current president of the regional council of La Réunion was initially mentioned, but  she later declined the nomination as the socialist party did not support it. Considering the regrettable decline of parity in the assembly, the nomination of a third woman Prime Minister would be welcome, although it shouldn’t overshadow the complex and often deceiving reality of gender equality on the French political scene.

Camille Barbe is a doctoral candidate in law at the Centre d’études et de recherches comparatives sur les constitutions, les libertés et l’Etat (CERCCLE) – Université de Bordeaux. Her research focuses on the interactions between parity in politics and feminist constitutionalism in France and Ireland. She was previously a trainee at the DCU Brexit Institute.

The views expressed in this blog post are the position of the author and not necessarily those of the Brexit Institute blog.

Photo – assemblee-nationale.fr/