The closest and most stable union–party relationship in France developed after World War Two between the CGT and PCF. On the non-communist left, close relationships also developed between the PS on the one hand and FO and the CFDT on the other. In both cases, however, although ‘political families’ may still be discernible, the links between unions and parties have become weaker since the 1980s, as can be seen from voting behaviour.
While data on the voting behaviour of trade union members is not available, opinion polls regularly measure voting behaviour according to trade union ‘sympathy’ or ‘proximity’, and this can be used as a proxy for the extent to which unions can deliver votes to parties and, conversely, the extent to which parties can deliver members to unions.
Until the 1980s, it was possible to speak of loose ties based on ideological affinity (Daley, 1993). Thus, the majority of CGT members would follow the union’s call to support the party at election time. Likewise, the majority of CFDT members would vote for the PS, resulting in one communist and one non-communist bloc on the Left of French politics. However, in recent years these ideological links appear to have weakened. Even though the CGT stopped issuing any voting guidance to its members in the 1988 presidential election, over half of the members of the confederation voted communist in the next national elections, the 1993 legislatives. By the 1997 legislative elections, however, this figure had fallen to 39 per cent, while more of those close to the CGT voted for the socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, than voted for the communist candidate, Robert Hue – 39 to 35 per cent – in the 1995 presidential election (Andolfatto, 2001, pp. 75–77). This trend has continued into the 2000s, with the PS candidate gaining more votes from CGT sympathizers than the PCF candidate in the presidential elections of 2002, 2007 and 2012 (Table 1). The latter election did see a drift back towards the PCF-backed candidate, but this was not a communist. Indeed, after a disastrous showing in the 2007 elections when the PCF candidate, Marie-Georges Buffet, scored less than 2 per cent in the first round (with only 7 per cent of CGT sympathizers voting for her as opposed to 42 per cent who voted for the PS candidate, Ségolène Royal), the PCF did not put up its own candidate, but allied itself with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Left Party to form the Left Front with Mélenchon as the presidential candidate.
Table 1 Voting behaviour according to trade union support (first round of Presidential elections, %) As we have seen, the CFDT has been close to the PS since the 1970s. In the 1993 legislative elections, just over 40 per cent of those professing to be close to the CFDT voted for PS, with 45 per cent giving their support to Lionel Jospin, the PS candidate in the 1995 presidential elections (Andolfatto, 2001, pp. 75–77). Support, however, has fluctuated in the twenty-first century, falling to 26 per cent in the 2002 presidential elections before rising again to 56 per cent in 2012 (Table 1). Although the PS gets the lion’s share of the votes from CFDT sympathizers, the vote is split. One in five CFDT sympathizers regularly votes for the Gaullist candidate in presidential and legislative elections, a figure that rose to one in three in 1997 (Andolfatto, 2001, p. 76), and to 44 per cent in the 2007 presidential elections. Even in 2012, when CFDT supporters returned to the socialist fold, 15 per cent still voted for the Gaullist candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, and 12 per cent for the National Front’s Marine Le Pen (Table 1).
FO, traditionally close to the left of the PS, shows a similar trajectory: a move away from support for extreme left parties and increasing support for the socialists. The latter trend is not as pronounced as for the CFDT or CGT, and the voting behaviour of FO supporters is the most diverse of any of the unions considered here. Indeed, while the PS again gets the highest share of the votes at 28 per cent, the centre, Gaullists and the FN also score well, with the latter getting one in four votes from FO sympathizers in 2012 (Table 1).
Among other trade unions, similar trends can be seen. Most unionists’ votes go to the PS, with the exception of the USS, whose members seem to have progressively abandoned the extreme left, initially to the benefit of the socialists, then to the benefit of the Left Front in 2012. FSU and USS votes are far more concentrated on the left of the political divide than those of other unions, with the FSU, in particular, showing strong support for the PS.
Thus, while the PS still benefits from the highest levels of electoral support from trade unionists in France (with the exception of the right-leaning CFTC), the seemingly stable ‘political families’ of the 1970s are disintegrating. The PCF–CGT dyad has all but disappeared, with CGT voters only returning to the fold once the PCF has lost its prominent position as the main left alternative to the PS. Even then, PS supporters outnumbered PCF/FG supporters among CGT sympathizers in 2012. Along with the CGT, USS votes are split between the FG/extreme left and the PS. The main unions historically close to the PS – the CFDT and FO – have seen large percentages and at times the majority of their sympathizers abandon the left altogether for centrist, Gaullist and even National Front candidates in presidential elections in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, CFDT, UNSA and FSU sympathizers tend to support the PS. However, while the PS is the main electoral beneficiary of trade unionists’ votes, this support is volatile and fragmented with only sympathizers of the FSU voting in their majority for the PS candidate in more than one of the three presidential elections of the twenty-first century (Table 1).
From the party side, trade union weakness and fragmentation in France has long weakened the attractiveness of stable party–union relations. Indeed, the traditional independence of unions and their appeal to workers irrespective of their partisan allegiance means that they cannot deliver voters en bloc to any one party at election time, a problem that has continued into this century. Thus, in terms of cost–benefit exchange, with the exception of the FSU, unions cannot consistently deliver voters to the PS. Once in power, the PS has little to lose, therefore, in alienating some of its trade union constituency by pursuing policies it perceives as necessary and achievable within the wider constraints imposed by global financial markets and economic crisis.
The fact that union sympathizers have coalesced behind the PS in recent elections should not therefore be seen as a sign of closer ties or union influence, but of the fact that since the late 1970s, the PS has emerged as the only credible left party of government. Put simply, if they wish to have any influence on government policy, unions, their members and sympathizers have nowhere else to go. However, if a left party captures power, it lacks a credible and dependable union interlocutor due to the political heterogeneity of the union base. While close relations are at times possible, these tend to be unstable as the experience of the 1981–1984 socialist government’s relations with the CFDT show.
For parties in government, this is not a major problem. Historically, the State has been seen, and has portrayed itself, as the guarantor of the general interest. As we have argued elsewhere (Parsons, 2002), there are deep historical roots to this, producing a powerful discourse about the role of the state in France that has resulted in a certain suspicion of organized interests, and a consequent centralization of decision-making power. Under the Fifth Republic, established in 1958, de Gaulle rejected any claims of interest groups to determine policy, claiming that even the most representative lacked authority and political responsibility, as opposed to the state that, alone, could incarnate and serve the national interest. On the other hand, he accepted that they should be consulted over policy. However, the general picture was one of highly centralized, state-dominated policy-making (Hazareesingh 1994, pp. 151–152; Knapp and Wright, 2006, p. 321). From the 1980s, the Jacobin state may have come under pressure, externally from globalization and Europeanization and internally from state policies of decentralization, deregulation and privatization, but unions have not been able to capitalize on this as these same developments have weakened them (Parsons, 2005, 2013).
From the union side, the political heterogeneity of membership means that they have little incentive to continue to support a government that cannot, or will not, deliver their preferred policies. This is all the more the case as such rational calculations must be made within the constraints of an ideational heritage that looks unfavourably upon close union–party links.
Structurally, the multi-party system in France means that political division risks being internalized by unions. Although the main unions had a political project, defined in terms of the emancipation of the working class, partisan political allegiance was rejected for this reason in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While this model did not reflect the reality of relations in the post-war period, there has, to some extent at least, been a return to it since the 1980s. The main manifestation of this is the weakening of the link between the PCF and the CGT, and this can largely be explained by the electoral decline of the communists following participation in the first Mitterrand government and the collapse of the USSR (Pernot, 2010, p. 194). While one in five voters voted for PCF candidates in presidential and parliamentary elections in the 1960s and 1970s, this had halved by the mid-1980s and halved again during the 2000s with the PCF regularly scoring under 5 per cent, and the PCF candidate, Marie-George Buffet, only gaining 1.9 per cent of the votes in the first round of the 2007 presidential elections (france-politique, no date, c). While the CGT’s search for greater autonomy from the PCF reflects the battle between orthodox and modernizing currents within both organizations, strategic cost–benefit considerations related to the decline of the PCF are also important, with the CGT having a strategic incentive to broaden its appeal beyond its traditional communist base and to avoid the reputational damage of being closely allied to a declining and increasingly discredited political force. Other unions find themselves in a similar, although not so severe, situation, with a need to take the political heterogeneity of their members and potential members into account when assessing the benefits of relations with parties.
Thus, contradictory trends seem to be at work. On the one hand, the emergence of the PS as the only credible Left party of government may give unions greater incentives to support the party in the hope of gaining political influence, giving rise to the possibility of a more institutionally linked social democratic bloc. Such a possibility is increased by the break-up of the PCF–CGT dyad and the rallying of the majority of the latter’s sympathizers to the PS. On the other hand, other structural variables – the fragmentation of the union movement, the catch-all nature of the PS, the continued relative centralization of decision-making power and the constraints of globalization and Europeanization – as well as political contingencies associated with policy-making during a time of crisis, all mitigate against close party–union relations. Thus, alongside austerity packages, Hollande’s presiding over an increased flexibility of the labour market through the ‘flexicurity’ agreement may have been a ‘considerable achievement’, but it was also upsetting to the trade union movement (Clift, 2014, p. 10; Clift and Ryner, 2014). Given these major constraints, the rallying of support to Hollande in 2012 was ever only likely to be temporary.
Indeed, in many respects the changes associated with the 2012 presidential elections were politically contingent, dependent upon the impact of right-dominated governments since 2002, which engaged in sometimes radical social reform against the wishes of the unions – in particular the raising of the pension age from 60 to 62 in 2010. To this could be added the effects of crisis management by these right-wing governments, with announcements of spending cuts and rising taxes to deal with government debt in a context of high and rising unemployment. In this respect, the CFDT’s stance could be explained, not by a desire to renew and reinforce ties with PS, but by the restricted space for collective bargaining on issues such as pension reform under the previous administration (Pernot, 2010, pp. 213–214). For other unions too, any attempt to gain political influence could only mean support for the PS as the other major party of the Left, the PCF, had gone into sharp decline. As Didier Le Reste, the General Secretary of the CGT Railway Federation, put it, ‘I think that we went too far towards a position of independence and political neutrality. That led to a certain depoliticization, which contributed to weakening the balance of power’ (Deslandes, 2011). Unions therefore want to see the left returned to power in the hope of gaining support for trade union campaigns and struggles.
However, with the exception of Thibault, union leaders hesitated to come out in favour of any particular party. In the case of the CGT this can be explained by its desire to clearly demarcate itself from the CGT and to appeal to a wider social base. For other unions, in the context of multi-party electoral competition engendered by the French two-ballot system, it is better to say who you are against rather than to specify who you are for. This is not only because unions’ membership bases have become more politically heterogeneous, so a declaration in favour of any particular candidate or party runs the risk of alienating significant proportions of the current and potential members. It is also a function of the ideational heritage of the early trade union movement in France.
Indeed, any transgression of the demarcation between what is considered union activity and the role of parties comes up against a strong element of French political culture. As has been demonstrated above, trade union independence from political parties was a myth, but it was, and still is, a powerful one. Opinion polls regularly show that, while French unions have a generally positive image among French workers, the main criticism of them is that they are too politicized (Labbé and Croisat, 1992, pp. 129–131; Parsons, 2013). In 2013, a TNS-Sofres poll found that the level of confidence in unions among wage-earners to defend their interests had remained stable since 2010 at 55 per cent. However, there was also a degree of stability in the proportion criticizing unions for being ‘too ideological’ (76 per cent in 2013) and ‘too politicized’ (69 per cent in 2013) (TNS-Sofres, 2013). In Labbé and Croisat’s (1992) study of the CFDT, even those sympathetic to, or members of, a political party rejected party–union links. Indeed, in the study this was a motivating factor for 40 per cent of those who had left the CFDT (Labbé and Croisat, 1992, pp. 129–152). Maintaining, in public, at least, a distance from political parties therefore serves union interests in a situation where membership is already extremely low, inter-union rivalry fierce and the free rider problem acute due to the nature of the French industrial relations system. In effect, extension procedures for collective agreements and the applicability of union gains to non-members reduce individual incentives to join (Parsons, 2005). The attempt to recruit across as broad a base as possible, therefore, gives an incentive to relations with parties being kept on a largely informal and ad hoc basis.
It can be seen that party–union links in France have been historically shaped by the notion of union independence enshrined in the 1906 Charter of Amiens. While complete union independence may have been a historical myth, the lack of organic links means that unions do not donate to parties, either to sponsor election campaigns or MPs, or via a collective affiliation of members, again weakening incentives for close relations on a cost–benefit calculation.