Imagining a French electoral college

By THE DATA TEAM

FRANCE’S presidential election bears some superficial similarities to America’s presidential campaign last year. Both contests pitted populists—Marine Le Pen in France and Donald Trump in the United States—against liberals with ties to high finance, who had held senior cabinet roles in the incumbent administrations (Emmanuel Macron in France and Hillary Clinton in America). In both elections, the establishment candidates won the popular vote by a narrow but decisive margin—three percentage points in Mr Macron’s case, two in Ms Clinton’s. However, a difference between the two countries’ political systems caused the outcomes of the elections to diverge. America’s electoral college handed the presidency to the nationalist candidate, whereas France’s two-round method with the winner chosen by popular vote is expected to deliver victory to the globalist one by a comfortable margin.

Might Ms Le Pen be celebrating already today if France had copied the American electoral college? Her voters did tend to be rural and geographically dispersed, just like Mr Trump’s. In contrast, Mr Macron’s supporters concentrated in cities as Ms Clinton’s did.

The American system can be translated to France with some straightforward arithmetic. Considering the 18 French regions—13 in metropolitan France and five overseas—as analogous to American states, each one gets two senators. Maintaining the American ratio of 4.35 members of the lower chamber for each of the 36 senators, the French House of Representatives would have 157 seats. Since each region is guaranteed at least one representative in the lower house, 139 seats would be allocated on the basis of population using the method of equal proportions. Finally, each region would be weighted in the electoral college by the total number of its representatives in both chambers.

The California of the French electoral college would be Île-de-France, the region that contains Paris. With just over 12m residents, 18% of the French population, it would cast 30 of the 193 electoral votes. The runner-up would be Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, with 20 electoral votes, followed by Hauts-de-France and New Aquitaine, with 16 each. Pulling up the rear would be the island of Corsica and the five overseas regions, all but one of which would get the minimum of three votes.

Just as in the United States, a French electoral college would have negated the liberal candidate’s advantage in the popular vote. Although Mr Macron prevailed in the two biggest regions, Ms Le Pen came first in seven of the next nine. The result would be a stunning tie: the two leaders would have received 90 electoral votes each, with the leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon claiming ten (all from overseas regions) and the conservative François Fillon a paltry three.

Using these rules, no candidate would have won a majority of the electoral college. As a result, under the system implemented by the 12th amendment to the United States constitution in 1804, the House of Representatives would then pick the victor, with each region getting one vote regardless of its size. Assuming that each region supported the candidate that won it, the contender supported by the majority of regions would be named president.

With eight of the eighteen regions to her name, Ms Le Pen would be only two short of an absolute majority. Mr Macron would be behind with six (and likely also supported by Mr Fillon’s one region). It would be up to supporters of Mr Mélenchon, who won three regions, to pick the next president: the future of Europe would rest on the radical left of France.