How much influence will off-shore voters have in the French election?
April 19th, 2007 | 
Author: One of the striking differences of this election vs previous ones is that there is an appreciation that a significant proportion of the French population lives overseas.
Of a total population of 53 million voters, an estimated minimum of 2 million are resident abroad. Now 4% or so might not sound like a very big proportion but critically, the political makeup of the overseas French is considered different from the political makeup of those remaining in France and, on the whole, they are more to the right than to the left. How come? Well, the typical left wing approach of bribing the electorate by increases in social security payments clearly won’t work with this group as they simply won’t receive them ie there is no pull towards the left for them. On the other side, they will, for the most part, be in countries that are more to the right than France is and can see a less socialist system actually working ie there is a pull to the right. Combine these and you get a drift to the right for this group as compared to the makeup of those remaining in France.
Surely, that doesn’t really matter as there aren’t really that many of them, are there? Whilst it’s true that the absolute numbers represent a mere 4% percent of the population compare this to the typical predictions of the share of the vote for each candidate: you’ve around 27%, around 25% and around 20% for the leading candidates. That means that only 2% percent can change the running order and that’s why those overseas voters are so important.
Consequently, we have the peculiar sight of a political rally in London conducted entirely in French.
Is it right that these people should be able to vote at all though? After all, some of these people have been abroad for 20 years or more. I’d question the validity of the vote of someone who has been living outside France for that long. What contact would they really have had with the issues affecting people who live in France? Would they even understand the issues after so long? Yes, some will, but the majority will not.
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Heya, just dropped by to say thanks for dropping by at my blog 🙂
Hey Arnold,
I’ve been commenting about this a lot over at Immigration Orange.
Borderless French Election
Anti-Immigrant Fervor in France
Been interested to hear about what you think and I’m glad you finally commented on it. I definitely think that these voters should be allowed to vote as we live in a global society now where the policies of one country certainly affect another. Especially in the EU where things are becoming a lot more integrated. You can look at it backwardly and say that these people don’t know what to vote for, or you can look at it as a sign of a new type of politics.
Hi, thanks for adding my blog in to technorati favourites
I think that it’s OK to let them vote for the first few years after they leave the country but there comes a point when they just get out of touch with their country. After that time comes (5 years? 10?), I don’t think they should be allowed to vote as I don’t think that their vote is really valid at that point.
What about their childrens right to vote for that matter? Is it right that my son John would be able to vote in the UK despite being born in France? If we’re still here when he’s 18, what would he really know about UK issues? What about the next generation? For that matter, it’s possible that there are some people living in America today who retained their British citizenship through their ancestors prior to 1776 yet have never been in the UK: is it right that such people would retain a right to vote in the UK?
I do take your point about globality meaning that issues in one country affect those in another but in Europe that’s taken account of. I can vote in local and European French elections whilst retaining the right to vote in the UK too (but not in local or European elections ie one person, one vote).
The problem is that the retention of that right to vote in national elections can cause a significant distortion of the voting process. In fact the situation is worse than I said in the post as the figure of 4% of overseas is calculated on the basis that the distibution of ages is the same in the overseas population as it is in the population remaining at home. I suspect that in reality the electorate overseas is more like 8% on the basis that a much higher proportion are adults than those that remain at home.
However, the principal problem is that those who have emmigrated are thought to be, on the whole, more right wing than those that remained at home so you could easily get the situation whereby those living in a country wanted a left wing regime yet a right wing one was voted in by people who’ve left the country. Were that to happen, I just wonder if you’d get a similar situation to the Boston Tea Party but in this case “representation without taxation” rather than “taxation without representation”?
I see your point, although I wonder if the taxes are actually as you describe them, as it is different everywhere.
You’re also assuming that those who vote have some sort of special knowledge when in fact most voters, and especially people that don’t vote usually don’t know very much even about their own national politics.
I was born in Guatemala of U.S. citizen parents and despite having spent 18 years in Guatemala I was still very educated about happenings in the U.S.
The number of years before people “lose touch” with their native country will vary. You were lucky. In this area, almost all of the brits settling here just ignore the British education of their children and I would consider most of those children as more French than British. Some of them can barely speak English for instance and very few can read or write English.
It should be different these days as obviously it was a lot harder 18 years ago for your parents yet even with the easy availability of UK satellite TV, English books via Amazon and the like, few seem to avail of such things.
It’s not so much “special knowledge” but the insight that you get from chatting to people in work, in the shops, etc. For example, even though we watch TV from Northern Ireland, the recent house price boom caused by the settling in of the peace process completely passed over our heads ’til a friend from work e-mailed me about it. That one thing has had a major effect on politics in NI yet we missed it despite supposedly staying in touch via the news.
Likewise, I wonder how many French outside France would even have heard of the riots of last year? Very little of it was reported on global news (or such as we saw here) yet it was a very big political event in France and will probably affect the voting now.
Actually, that’s one aspect that I really like about your blog – it keeps me on top of things that ordinarily are totally passed over.