The Failure of the French Left Open Primaries in 2017

While open primaries seem to have been established as a "new international standard for the selection" of candidates (Lefebvre & Treille, 2019), the primaries of the left in France in the 2017 presidential elections have been an increasingly criticized process. Some candidates have even, at the end of the selection process, disassociated themselves from the candidate chosen by the citizens. While the transformation of the Socialist Party over the last 30 years was characterized in particular by the transformation of the phenomenon of currents into presidential stables, in a logic of presidentialization, the open primaries are both the culmination of this logic but also the shifting of internal partisan clashes to the outside, on the occasion of the presidential election. Based on a participant observation, particularly in the team of one of the candidates but also in the national primary organizing committee, as well as unpublished electoral results per polling station, we propose in this article an analysis of this process of partisan fragmentation, linked in particular to the weakening of the currents that favoured internal regulation logics and accelerated by the primary. We will first develop the organizational context of this primary, conceived by its organizers (the direction of the Socialist Party) as a means of relegitimizing the incumbent president, before the election. The primary was then unevenly armed between the candidates running against the President of the Republic. It appeared to be one of the rare opportunities for the minority faction within the Socialist Party to publicly express its alternative project, since the debate had left the Socialist Party to enter the parliamentary field (Lecomte). We shall then see how the President of the Republic's renunciation to stand for re-election upsets the strategies of the candidates. It came to support the rise in power of Benoît Hamon, had not made the assessment of the outgoing president his main campaign focus. More than a debate on the balance sheet, the campaign became more ideological. Our third part, devoted to the consequences of the primary, will begin with an analysis of the election results. If the first round of the vote, which was essentially urban, was a vote on issues, linked to the program proposed by Benoît Hamon in particular, the second round was characterized by a stronger polarization linked to the rejection of the personality of the outgoing Prime Minister. This deep division of the left-wing electorate, reinforced by the primary, and a few technical errors that received media coverage, contributed to undermining the credibility of a process that had nonetheless worked in 2012 and seemed to be the key towards the victory. In the run-up to the 2022 presidential election, while the Socialist Party is weakened, this selection process is strongly questioned.