how the attribution of political nuances works | EUROtoday

The candidates and lists nominated within the municipal elections by La France insoumise (LFI) will probably be categorized, for the primary time for the reason that creation of the occasion in 2016, within the “extreme left” bloc, alongside Lutte Ouvrière, the New Anticapitalist Party and the Independent Workers’ Party, and not within the left bloc, in accordance with a round printed on February 2 by the Ministry of the Interior.

This announcement sparked robust reactions on the left. “Why this transformation? Why now? “, castigated the leader of LFI, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on February 7, announcing an appeal to the Council of State. For his part, the first secretary of the Socialist Party (PS), Olivier Faure, judged that it was not “not fair” to classify LFI as far left and denounced a maneuver to demonize the far right.

This controversy resonates with the criticisms addressed, at each election, to this system of attribution of partisan labels, from both sides of the political spectrum. But how does it work, and what is it used for? The Decoders explain.

Label, shade, block: what are the differences?

Political nuance is carried out in a similar way for all elections where numerous lists and candidates present themselves: municipal, departmental, regional, legislative and senatorial.

In municipal elections, candidate lists are free to declare their affiliation with a political party or movement, this is their “declared political label”. It does not respond to any categorization or verification. But the specificity of this ballot is that the vast majority of lists are traditionally “unlabeled”, that is to say they do not declare any political affiliation, either to a party or to a current.

Except that this sometimes harms the political readability of the ballot for voters and “electoral analysis”according to the Ministry of the Interior. The latter therefore carries out a “political nuance” of the candidate lists: each of them will be assigned one of the 25 political nuances of the list, published in a circular from the Ministry of the Interior. This nomenclature generally includes the majority parties and currents at the national level before the election. The list changes depending on the elections: for example, during the 2020 municipal elections, a “yellow vest” nuance was retained.

The candidates on the lists will also be assigned a shade which may be different from that of their list. For example, in a union list between the Socialist Party (PS) and The Ecologists, qualified as “union of the left” according to the ministry’s criteria, some candidates could be qualified as PS and others as Les Ecologists.

This nuance will only take place in municipalities with more than 3,500 inhabitants or in sub-prefectures which do not exceed this threshold, i.e. 15 municipalities in 2026.

Finally, the “cleavage blocks” group the 25 shades into six blocks: extreme left, left, center, right, extreme right and miscellaneous. In 2020, the Ministry of the Interior argued that such a grouping allowed “to quickly assess the balance of power with a view to the second round”. It is this reading which was called into question by La France insoumise, the LFI nuance being grouped there with the anti-capitalist parties within the “extreme left” bloc.

How to determine the nuance of a list?

The allocation of a nuance is a prerogative of the prefect and his sub-prefects. To do this, they must be based on a “bundle of consistent and objective indices”which are in particular the political affiliation claimed by the candidates, their campaign program and their public positions.

The simplest case is that of a list invested by a important party without alliance with other camps. Indeed, certain parties (16 in total) have a nuance that corresponds exactly to them, and to them alone. Thus, a list invested by the PS without an alliance with Les Ecologistes or with the French Communist Party (PCF) will have the nuance “Socialist Party”.

More complicated: the case where a list is invested or supported by two or more parties which each have their own nuances but which belong to the same “cleavage bloc”. This could be the case, in March, of a Macronist list supported both by Renaissance and by the MoDem, or of a list invested jointly by the PS and Les Ecologistes, or even of a list supported by the National Rally (RN) and the Union of Rights for the Republic. In this situation, the list takes on the nuance “union list” by specifying the political family of parties which support it (left, right, extreme right, etc.).

Finally, several criteria are used to assign the other nuances, which are generic designations such as “extreme left”, “various left”, “regionalist” or “sovereignist right”. In particular, fall into these categories:

• a list invested in or supported by a party which does not have its own nuance (for example, a left-wing list supported by Place publique will be nuanced “various left”);
• a list showing a certain political sensitivity even if it does not have the support of an identified party;
• a list led by one or more dissidents from a party, who stand for election even though they are at odds with their original formation.

The prefects are also invited to “re-examine” the nuance in the case where two lists merge between the first and second rounds of the election, to assign the most suitable nuance to the fruit of the merger.

What recourse for dissatisfied elected officials and parties?

Any candidate can request communication of the nuance assigned to them. If he does not agree, he has the right to demand a rectification from the prefecture, justifying why it does not reflect his real affiliation. These requests must remain “exceptional and limited” and be formulated until “three days before the election”according to the circular published by the Ministry of the Interior. In response, the administration can recognize its error and correct the nuance, or reject the request.

The parties can contest the ministerial circular which establishes in particular the cleavage blocks in order to make the electoral results more readable. In this case, they will file an interim appeal before the Council of State. The highest administrative court then has one month to rule and assess whether there was an error of assessment.

During the 2020 municipal elections, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan’s Debout la France party challenged its classification as “excessive proper” and won its case. The judge considered that this classification “can only be explained by the support provided by the president of the party, at the end of the first round of the 2017 presidential election, in favor of the president of the National Rally” and that the program of Debout la France as well as the absence of an electoral agreement concluded with the RN had not been taken into account.

Three years later, during the 2023 senatorial elections, the RN was classified in the “extreme right” bloc and in turn seized the Council of State, judging that this choice undermined the “sincerity of the vote”. Marine Le Pen’s party also argued that due to “principle of equality”LFI and the PCF, then classified in the “left” bloc, were to be classified as “extreme left”. The high administrative court rejected this request, confirming the RN’s attachment to the far right.

The courts now have until March 4 to rule on LFI’s request to rejoin the “left” bloc, eleven days before the first round of municipal elections.