When Bookchin faces Bourdieu. French ‘weak’ municipalism,legitimation crisis and zombie political parties

Abstract

Chinese

The French municipal elections of 2020 were marked by the emergence of ‘citizen lists’ in several cities. These lists are discussed here as ‘weak’ form of new municipalism: they integrate some ideas and logics of new municipalism without having the same level of radicality as the most emblematic international examples of the movement. By analysing these initiatives from a political sociology perspective inspired by Bourdieu’s work on the political field, we develop three main arguments. First, new municipalism in France emerged in response to a deepening political crisis. At the local scale, this crisis is fuelling a misalignment between urban societies and political parties that support entrepreneurial agendas. This has laid out the conditions for the emergence of a new municipalism, formed of complex and contradictory new social alliances. Second, this movement has been dominated by a ‘participationist ideology’. Citizens’ lists have placed strong emphasis on the search for innovative participatory tools, but have invested much less energy in the construction of an alternative urban political platform. Third, we underline the unfinished nature of the new municipalism revolution, where the movement’s impetus has been weakened by the resilience of ‘zombie’ political parties. In the end, the article highlights the need to take into greater consideration existing political and institutional contexts in the study of new municipalism.

Keywords

France new municipalism participatory democracy political parties urban entrepreneurialism

Introduction

Two weeks before the first round of the 2020 French municipal election, the national centre-left newspaper Libération encapsulated the general mood towards the emergence of new municipalism in big cities with an article headed ‘citizen lists, mirage or anchorage?’ (Billette, 2020). Such a suspicious tone – the journalist wrote that even a few far-right lists celebrated ‘participation’– revealed the division of the French left towards new municipalism. It contrasted with the generally enthusiastic tone of the new body of international research which has recently flourished around new municipalism. Based on the description of emblematic cases such as Barcelona in Spain, Preston in England, Zagreb in Croatia, Napoli in Italy, Rosario in Argentina or Jackson in the United States, these works are looking into the possible emergence of a ‘nascent global social movement’ (Baron et al., 2019; Bianchi, 2023; Duran-Folco and van Outryve, 2020; Milan, 2023; Russell, 2019; Thompson, 2021). This movement is built upon a radical project that aims at transforming both the content of urban policies and the way in which they are elaborated and implemented. It aims to promote the ‘politics of proximity’ (Russell, 2019), to challenge the hegemony of the national scale in social change and emancipation imaginaries. In concrete terms, this translates into a desire to revive citizens’ assemblies or, at least, to multiply the forms of direct participation to produce alternatives to urban neoliberal agendas. In the end, this movement seeks to become international by setting up networks to organise the resistance against austerity regimes and to prefigure alternative forms of economic exchange (Sareen and Waagsaether, 2023). It has taken up the torch of a municipalist tradition born at the end of the 19th century and adapted it to the contemporary urban condition (Guionnet, 2005).

Needless to say that in France, the largest cities have not yet experienced such political projects. If some ‘deep’ forms of new municipalism can be found in the country, it is rather in small rural towns (Girard, 2020). Certainly, the 2020 French municipal elections witnessed the emergence of ‘citizens’ lists’ (also called ‘participatory lists’), in large cities, smaller towns and rural locations (Aguilera, 2021; Dau, 2020; Gourgues et al., 2020). Most of the time, these lists shared several characteristics with new municipalism. They were intended to break away from partisan politics; they included people who had no previous experience as an activist or elected official; and they emphasised horizontal and non-hierarchical modes of construction of their electoral platform. But these lists remain strongly dependent on local party systems. Many of them were championed by former members of left-wing or green parties or had even been supported by these parties, with which they have made alliances. With this support, they managed to gain seats in municipal councils in cities such as Lyon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Besançon, Chambéry, Tours, Annecy or Poitiers. In short, in many cases, the rise of municipalism in French cities appears to be tightly controlled by existing parties.¹ This, we believe, explains the overemphasis on the procedures of participation, rather than on distributive issues, which characterises most French new municipalism. More generally, we relate our understanding of weak municipalism to Bourdieu’s (1981, 2000, 2020) concept of the political field, which states that newcomers are forced to deal with the pre-existing formal and unformal rules of the political field. More precisely, the fate of citizen lists – and therefore of new municipalism – is dependent on its local relationship with political parties and its ability to cope with the rules of political competition.

In France, the traditional parties – and especially the Socialist Party – are now weak at the national scale, but remain key players in the local political field (Lefebvre, 2020): we qualify them as ‘zombie parties’ which are losing their foothold in urban societies but remain able to set the rules of the political game and control newcomers. As a consequence, we argue that French new municipalism is incomplete in its capacity to build a counter hegemonic project due to its ‘participationist ideology’ (Gerbaudo, 2019). Born out of the legitimation crisis (Fraser, 2015), citizen lists over-invested in participatory democracy, in a procedural sense but not in a ‘genuinely political vein’ (Pinto et al., 2023). They put strong emphasis on the search for innovative participatory tools, valuing decision-making methods that promote the so-called ‘collective intelligence’, welcoming the intensive use of digital technology and social media, but put less energy into building an ideological project of social justice. This is why this paper contends that a form of ‘weak municipalism’ has emerged in France. Whilst this cannot be generalised to the entirety of the French experience, this specifically ‘weak’ municipalism can be defined as a strong emphasis on participatory tools as a way to bypass the wall of parties. All of this is far from being discouraging: as we will argue, analysing the limits of the French ‘weak’ municipalism can be helpful, not only for the academic discussion, but also for both national and international activists who rightly put hope in such a radical democratisation of local power.

We will develop our argument as follows. Section 2 will clarify in more depth what we mean by ‘weak municipalism’, and why it is important to analyse it. It will do so by relating it both to wider literature on municipalism, and grounding in Bourdieu’s understanding of the political field and its relation to political legitimation crises. Following a brief presentation of our methodology and case studies (third section), the fourth section will interpret French new municipalism as the product of an urban legitimation crisis, whose three main components are the demise of urban entrepreneurialism, the decline in people’s confidence in politics and the decentralisation of the social democracy crisis. The fifth section will emphasise the three limits faced by new municipalism activists after the 2020 election: the eviction of the most radical activists from the political field; the focus on procedural issues rather than distributive ones; and the resistance of the traditional left-wing parties, sometimes resorting to old-fashioned clientelist methods. We conclude by suggesting that in France, the response to the crisis of urban legitimation is still unsolved: local political practices have remained constrained by the routines and frameworks of the existing political field.

Localising ‘weak’ new municipalism within the delegitimised French political field

In contemporary urban France, citizen lists could be analysed as a ‘weak’ form of new municipalism. Their radicality and their will to recast urban policy and politics are more timid than in the paradigmatic cases of new municipalism. Even if the citizens’ lists were able to disrupt the local political game in Toulouse, Marseilles, Nantes, Strasbourg, Chambéry or Poitiers, the two-round proportional voting system often forced them to build alliances with established political parties between the two rounds before the election. Despite their incompleteness, French weak cases are heuristic to understand how new municipalism can emerge in constrained political, institutional and social contexts that frame local politics. More precisely, our interest in weak forms of new municipalism arises for three reasons.

First, their analysis allows for a better understanding of the factors that favour (or not) the emergence of new municipalism. Blanco et al. (2020: 22) hypothesise that the ‘intensity of social protests against austerity urbanism and the electoral support for the emerging political subjects partially depends on the intensity of the socioeconomic crisis’. Indeed, the economic and urban crises in France have not had the devastating effect that they had in countries such as Spain or the United States. The scalar dumping of fiscal discipline (Peck, 2012) in the regime of a consolidation State (Streeck, 2017), which saw some states make local government spending the adjustment variable in policies to reduce public deficits, came later (under the presidencies of François Hollande – 2012–2017 and since then Emmanuel Macron) and remained much more moderate than in Britain, for example. Social conflict was as much about fiscal pressure as about austerity itself. The most powerful recent social movement in France, the Gilets Jaunes, certainly reflects a territorial crisis, but not a primarily urban one. The movement has largely mobilised social groups – upper working-class and lower middle-class – mostly located in peri-urban areas that have been directly impacted by the creation of a carbon tax on fuel prices in 2018 (Blavier, 2021; Challier, 2019; Collectif d’enquête sur les Gilets jaunes, 2019). Bayırbağ and Penpecioğlu (2017) mention the importance of the containment mechanisms enforced by municipal institutions as a factor that prevents or mitigates the occurrence of urban social movements. In France, the rich ‘participatory offer’ (Gourgues, 2012) put together by public institutions since the early 2000s may have prevented the emergence of a strong new municipalism movement.

Second, analysing weak forms of new municipalism allows a gap to be filled in existing research, which is dominated by the description of paradigmatic cases such as Barcelona, Berlin, Jackson or the Rojava (Russell, 2019; Thompson, 2021). It is not to say that these cases are not important: indeed, they exemplify how new municipalism could promote alternative urban policies and practices (housing in Barcelona, water in Berlin, economic issues in Jackson, radical participation in the Rojava). Their description has made it possible to construct ideal types of new municipalism, but their prevalence in the literature tends to obscure incomplete forms of new municipalism that are arguably more representative of the phenomenon. In particular, these cases involve urban social movements with a high degree of autonomy from political parties and local government. However, in many cases, particularly in France, the links between movements, parties and municipal institutions are much closer. Consequently, weak cases of new municipalism make it possible to not exaggerate the divide between state and society, parties and movements, ‘politics’ and ‘anti-politics’ (Beveridge and Koch, 2021).

Thirdly, weak cases allow another bias of work focused on ‘strong’ cases to be overcome, which we will call ‘intellectualist’ bias. According to Bourdieu (1980), this bias refers to the tendency of academics to consider that the categories through which they see the world are those which are at the origin of the actions of ‘ordinary’ actors. Indeed, urban scholars often fall into this bias. This was already the case with the ‘right to the city’, a notion inherited from Henri Lefebvre, which is often too quickly taken as the watchword which motivates activists involved in urban movements (Uitermark et al., 2012). The same bias can be found in many academic works on new municipalism as researchers try to identify the theoretical roots of these movements. Rubio-Pueyo (2017: 4) sees Bookchin’s municipalism ‘widely shared political vocabulary’ as the inspiration for Spanish municipalist movements. Thompson (2021) sees in new municipalism the mark of neo-Marxism, feminism and the work of Bookchin and Lefebvre. It is as if the new municipalism experiments were primarily laboratories for the implementation of these theories. This is not to underestimate the influence of social and political theorists. It is simply a matter of reminding that the genesis, form, fate and political impact of these movements can be explained by many other factors than intellectual inspirations.

To explore these blind spots in current academic works on new municipalism, we develop an approach that comes from political sociology. Inspired by Bourdieu’s seminal work on the political field² (Bourdieu, 1981, 2000, 2020), it takes as its starting point that political systems – national, as well as local ones (Briquet and Sawicki, 1989) – have specific and institutionalised rules with which newcomers are forced to deal (Wacquant, 2004). These formal and informal rules concern electoral competition, the relationships with voters or between parties, and more generally what is politically ‘feasible’ and ‘sayable’. They are imposed on newcomers who must learn and master them, even – in fact, especially – if they want to change them. In Bourdieu’s work, the political field is admittedly a field of struggles, but it is characterised above all by a tendency towards the exclusion of individuals, groups and movements with the least political capital (Bourdieu, 1981).

While Bourdieu’s work has recently gained popularity in urban studies (Savage, 2021; Wacquant, 2018, 2023), his influence within the international academic debate on urban policy and governance is still weak. With the exception of a few isolated uses of the concept of habitus (Painter, 1997; Shin, 2014), his work and specifically its concept of political field is rarely mobilised. This could be explained by the fact that urban studies tend to minimise the role of political competition and, even more, of political parties (Le Galeès, 2018; Marques, 2021). The latter are generally understood as secondary actors in urban politics (Bossuyt and Savini, 2018; Savini, 2014), and considered ‘things of the past’ (Mouffe, 2005) whose influence is marginal in urban governance (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Harvey, 1989; Lauermann, 2018). This consideration seems even stronger today with the weakening of party identification and partisanship in most European countries (Dalton, 2000; La Palombara, 2007). Yet it is central to understanding the complex rise of new municipalism, especially in France.

Methodology and presentation of the cases

The article draws on two source types. Firstly, field research conducted in 2020 and 2021 in four French cities: Chambéry, Marseilles, Montpellier and Strasbourg (See Table 1). We carried out 35 semi-structured interviews with local elected officials, candidates on the different lists and activists during the 2020 campaign and after the election. Secondly, we used secondary data on the French Citizens’ lists. The data was drawn from the national and local press, as well as from reports on these lists and more generally on the 2020 municipal elections.

Table 1.

Presentation of the four cases.

	Chambéry	Montpellier	Strasbourg	Marseilles
Population	60,000 inhabitants (conurbation: 200,000)	300,000 inhabitants (conurbation: 500,000)	300,000 inhabitants (conurbation: 500,000)	800,000 inhabitants (conurbation: 1, 6 M)
General profile	Slow demographic and economic growth, moderate inequalities	Fast demographic and economic growth, strong inequalities	Fast demographic and economic growth, moderate inequalities	Post-industrial decline with signs of gentrification, strong inequalities
Local regime	Political instability	Political stability (left-wing clientelism)	Political instability	Political stability (right-wing clientelism)
Main coalition	Right-wing (les Républicains)	Socialist Party	Moderate (Socialist party, then Green-Socialist)	Right-wing (les Républicains)
New municipalist list	Chambé Citoyenne (people from non-profit sectors who had formerly been left-wing and ecologist party activists)	#NousSommes (emerging networks that operate in the cooperative economy, young working people, often recently settled in the city)	Strasbourg Écologiste et Citoyenne (educated middle class)	Pacte démocratique (linked to social movements)
Alliance	With EELV prior to the election and with the PS between the two rounds of the municipal election	Refusal to form any alliances with political parties, while accepting the participation of activists from other parties (EELV, LFI)	EELV, the Communist Party (PC), Génération·s, Place Publique– and non-affiliated citizens.	Part of LFI; failure to conclude an alliance with the left-wing party coalition
Political stance	Rejection of pro-growth agenda and political professionalisation; ‘Collective intelligence’ methods	Radical participation and ecology (direct references to Bookchin)	Rejection of discourses on urban competitiveness (ecology and territorial equity)	Rejection of political professionalisation and rooted in urban struggles
Result	In the first round, the list obtained 22%, coming in third (behind the right-wing list and the PS list). After merging with the socialists, the list won the election and 18 seats in the municipal council.	The list was eliminated in the first round, before a controversial merger with a populist, a dissident ecologist and a centre-right list. The list’s leader was elected as councillor.	The list came out on top in the first round. It rejected merging with the socialist list, but ended up winning the election.	The list was bogged down in dead-end negotiations with a left-party list: Printemps Marseillais. It did not manage to attend the election.

The four cases were chosen for the presence of at least one citizen list that claimed to belong to new municipalism. They have also been selected for their diversity (in terms of size, socio-economic trajectory or political profile) to reflect the variety of new municipalism in French cities.

Despite their heterogeneity, these four cases cannot capture the diversity of new municipalism experiments in France. There were about 400 citizen lists in the 2020 municipal elections (compared to only a few dozen in the previous elections in 2014). Of these lists, not all claimed to be municipalist, but most of them made direct or indirect references to the movement (Dau, 2020). If the great majority of these lists wished to make a break with the political parties and revive local democracy, their nature varied according to their locale (Gourgues et al., 2020). Thus, in small towns and rural areas such as Saillans or Commercy, radical forms of new municipalism had been identified (Dau, 2020). In medium-sized towns such as Roanne or Nevers, affected by the withdrawal of the state and the dismantlement of public services (Béal et al., 2021), the issue of austerity has been central. So much so, that the four cases we propose to study in this article – that we describe as ‘weak municipalism’– are above all representative of the political reconfigurations brought about by the citizens’ lists in large French cities.

New municipalism as the product of the urban legitimation crisis

Over the past two decades, France has been undergoing a multifaceted urban legitimation crisis. In many places, the entrepreneurial agenda with its competitiveness policies is no longer producing the expected results in terms of economic dynamism, while at the same time, it reinforces social inequalities within cities and between them. The second dimension of the urban legitimation crisis is a decline in people’s confidence in politics. Local politicians are no longer immune to criticism: faced with the shift in power (towards market actors and metropolitan powers), their powerlessness is becoming increasingly apparent. Finally, this two-fold crisis converges to decentralise the social democracy crisis which constitutes the springboard for new municipalism.

Reacting against urban entrepreneurialism

French local discontent has been crystallising since the late 2010s onwards regarding the urban entrepreneurial agenda, that is, a set of national and local policies aiming at fostering urban growth and raising attractiveness (Harvey, 1989). These policies emerged in France in the 1980s and have since become the political mainstream. Urban flagship projects, eco-districts, branding campaigns and international strategies were the main urban policies in big and middle-sized cities during a couple of decades. While they were initially supported as a way to counterbalance the hegemony of Paris, by strengthening regional capitals, their legitimacy became eroded. Portrayed as ‘useless mega projects’ by activists (Camille, 2015; Collectif Des plumes dans le goudron, 2018), increasingly they have been pointing out their detrimental effects on social and environmental inequalities (Paquot, 2019).

This opposition to entrepreneurial policies has been visible in each of our four cases. It is particularly strong in Strasbourg where the ‘Strasbourg Écologiste et Citoyenne’ list emerged around the objective to break with the entrepreneurial agenda of the former socialist council. This agenda was once supported by the Greens, but started to be criticised by them when the socialist municipality decided to support the project of a privatised ring road implemented by Vinci, one of the world’s largest construction and concession firms. While the project was mainly contested for its environmental impact (rise of carbon emission, loss of agricultural fields, threat to natural species, etc.), it quickly became seen as an emblem of the ‘growth at any cost’ approach of the socialists. The controversy surrounding this project undermined the local alliance between the Socialists and the Greens:

The Socialists embodied values which were not ours. Trautmann [the Socialist mayor in the 1990s who was also a candidate in 2020] did good things for Strasbourg in the 1990s, but she is now too old school. She continues to think of the city with outdated keywords: competitiveness, urban standing, etc. (Strasbourg, Interview with a newly-elected councillor, February 2021).

This clash between two different ideological positions was not only about urban boosterism. The criticisms were also directed at other dimensions of urban policies: greenwashing; uneven distribution of economic resources between the different neighbourhoods; fallacy of participatory democracy, etc. Once elected, the autonomous list developed a new urban agenda that was devoid of ‘flagship projects’ but aimed at dealing with spatial, social, gender and environmental inequalities.

In the three other cases, the criticism of urban entrepreneurialism was present, but had less influence on the construction of the programme of the lists. In Marseilles for example, this criticism had been diluted in tactical issues:

In our platform, the issues of attractiveness, economic competitiveness, inequalities were present. But it’s weird because there was little debate […]. As if it was self-evident that we were anti-capitalist, that it was self-evident that we were feminist, that it was self-evident that we were anti-racist […] But how does that translate? It was never put down. (Marseilles, Interview with a member of the Pacte Démocratique, October 2020).

Thus, in most of the larger French cities, opposition to entrepreneurial agendas and policies was one of the main catalysts for the emergence of new municipalism lists (Mehtali and Rivière, 2021). As opposed to in Spain or Britain, the criticism of austerity was only a minor factor, except in small and medium-sized declining cities which were facing public services retrenchment.

The decentralisation of the distrust in representation

Alongside the opposition to urban entrepreneurialism, fertile ground for the emergence of municipalist lists has been provided by the eroding legitimacy of political institutions. The manifestations of this crisis have been widely documented: waning popularity of politicians; low electoral turnouts; rise of populism; emergence of ‘anti-system’ figures; and blurring of left–right divisions or the attempt to overcome them (Mény, 2019). This distrust in politics is now generalised in Europe (Hutter and Kriesi, 2019).

For a long time in France this crisis of mistrust in politics has somewhat spared local political spaces, especially municipal politics. Participation in municipal elections has remained comparatively high and local elected officials have, until recently, managed to escape the crisis of legitimacy (Le Bart, 2003). This was largely due to a strong personalisation of local politics and the relative discretion of party organisations (Kesselman, 1967). This is no longer the case. Local political spaces and personnel are now as affected by the crisis of legitimacy as those at national level. Many members of citizens’ lists claim their motivation for participation is due to their rejection of local political practices (professionalisation, role of the entourages of elected representatives, weight of partisan manoeuvres, etc.).

The starting point of the Chambé Citoyenne list was a meeting of 20 to 25 people. We all knew each other already. There were activists from citizens’ movements and associations who came from ecological associations, associations working with young people, in education, the fight against precariousness. There were also two or three representatives from the Greens who were also friends. […] We were some of those people who were jaded, disgusted with traditional political parties. I myself was one of those people who no longer voted. […] And at the same time there was this lucidity about the fact that the traditional parties, even the Greens, had very weak grassroots bases. (Member of the Chambé Citoyenne list, Interview, May 2021)

In Marseilles, the Pacte Démocratique was also the product of the political distrust. Despite their diversity, its members shared a critique of municipal power:

And there was one thing we all agreed on: when we talked about ‘democracy’, we talked about including working class neighbourhoods in decision-making. […] According to us, democracy means the exclusion of a large part of the population, beyond voting, from public policies. And what comes up all the time is indeed ‘working-class neighbourhoods’, ‘political exclusion’ […]. (Member of the Pacte Democratique movement, Interview, October 2020)

The citizens’ lists and the Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) movement have in common the rejection of the professionalisation of politics and the desire to promote more participatory forms of decision-making (such as a Citizens’ Initiative Referendum, or the self-organisation of activist groups) (Van Outryve D’Ydewalle, 2020). Considered a moment of ‘relocalization of politics’ (Jeanpierre, 2019), the Yellow Vests deeply affected the structuring of municipalist initiatives during the spring of 2020 (Carrel et al., 2020). Excluding Strasbourg, all our cases illustrate the direct or indirect connection between new municipalism and the Yellow Vests movement. In Chambéry, much like in Montpellier, individuals claiming to be Yellow Vests participated in the meetings that launched the citizen’s lists. The presence of Yellow Vests (Carrel et al., 2020) partly explained the priority of the movement which invested mostly in democratic issues. Some of the Yellow Vests’ proposals (for example, the Citizens’ Initiative Referendum in Marseilles) were thus found in the programmes of these lists and the way in which they were built was also based on the modes of organisation tested by the social movement.

Urban social democracy in turmoil

In France, citizens’ lists above all have risen up against traditional political parties. Of these parties, the Socialist party has been the most criticised since, as elsewhere in Europe, the party largely converted to neoliberalism. Its social-democrat ideology is now considered the main cause of the weakening of the left-wing emancipation ideal. Although the party is now weak at the national level (the number of Socialist MPs in the French parliament collapsed from 295 in 2012 to 31 in 2017 and had to join a coalition with LFI, Greens and Communists during the 2022 general election in order to survive), it still controls a large number of cities and regional assemblies. At the local scale, socialist elected representatives were the proud champions of entrepreneurial policies. Accelerated gentrification processes meant that their social base became much more bourgeois and their policies moved from alternative to mainstream. Their obsession with competitiveness increasingly overshadowed issues of redistribution:

I’ll tell you something that will surprise you. The socialist does not represent the left in Chambéry. In fact, there is a line of technocrats […] who come out of Sciences Po³ and who are professional politicians, with the obsessions of professional politicians. […] But they have no roots in the local society. They are managing the city but they are not there to bring about major changes. (Member of the Chambé Citoyenne list, Interview, May 2021)

The new municipalism upsurge can be interpreted as a response to the drift of predominantly social-democrat urban entrepreneurialism. In many ways and quite ironically, new municipalism lists have the same role as the left-wing union lists in the 1970s. At that time, under the leadership of François Mitterrand, the PS was undergoing a radical re-invention in order to attract the middle-class votes. This middle class that emerged from the expansion of welfare state no longer felt represented by the right-wing parties, nor by the communist or by the socialist – the latter had entered into alliances with centre-right parties to oppose the Communists and Gaullists. After the May 1968 social conflicts, the 1970s were marked by a misalignment between urban societies and what the parties were offering. In 1971, Mitterrand committed the newly created Parti socialiste (that replaced the SFIO, Section française de l’internationale ouvrière) to a twofold strategy: forging an alliance with the Communist Party, and using the social movements’ resources by acting as an anchor for them. L’Union de la gauche offered an electoral outlet to the new middle classes who no longer felt represented by the existing landscape of parties (Pinson, 2020). Somehow, new municipalism lists have expressed a similar moment of misalignment within the middle class. The efforts of the Greens and LFI to support and/or enter these lists embody the same strategy as the one implemented by the PS in the 1970s in order to benefit from grassroots activism.

A political change under constraints

The success of citizens lists and their alliances with green and left-wing political parties have allowed new municipalism activists to enter the councils of many large cities. Therefore, the response to the crisis of urban legitimation has not yet led to radical changes. Local political practices have remained constrained by the routines and frameworks of the existing political field. This section examines the paradoxical strength of the ‘zombie’ political parties. Firstly, political parties have managed to absorb the spirit of citizen participation while keeping the most radical activists apart. Secondly, the focus on participatory democracy has oriented the debates towards procedural issues rather than distributive ones. Finally, and paradoxically, political parties retain their capacity to mobilise the last segments of voters, sometimes resorting to old-fashioned clientelist methods.

New municipalism against the wall of parties

In most French localities, citizens’ lists have come up against existing local political parties. Weakened at the national level, the traditional parties – both from the centre-right and the centre-left – could have been swept away by the new municipalist wave. This was indeed one of the aims pursued by their members, however, they did not fully achieve it. Traditional political parties managed to limit any possible damage and, in some cases, they succeeded in taming municipal activists by integrating them in their own list.

These trends are visible in our four case studies, but also in many other French cities (Gourgues et al., 2020). In Strasbourg and Marseilles, Socialist and Green parties have been able to control coalitions’ lists that included candidates from civil society. These lists are still largely made up of career politicians who occupy the highest positions on these lists, and often head them.⁴ This, of course, gave rise to accusations of instrumentalisation and ‘citizenwashing’ against the parties. The electoral system gave an advantage to existing parties, and reduced the chances of a new movement’s electoral emergence. In Chambéry, for example, the Chambé Citoyenne list came third after the first round, shortly behind the list conducted by a Socialist politician. Then, the majority of the movement voted in favour of merging with the Socialist list, which created a lasting split in the movement.

The weight of the traditional parties has also placed a burden upon the internal organisation of the social movements. Several lists claiming to be municipalist have eventually benefitted from party support, which has led to questions about the dilution of their grassroots identity. For example, in Montpellier, municipalist activists resigned when their list obtained the support of LFI, which had nevertheless helped the movement rise in the polls (Audemard et al., 2021). In Marseilles, the members of the Pacte démocratique were consumed by endless, fruitless negotiations with party representatives (socialist, communist), who came from the competing left-wing coalition list (Printemps Marseillais) (Maisetti and Mattina, forthcoming).

By building relationships with mainstream political parties, municipalist activists are facing more experienced actors in political games and coalition logics. In Chambéry, between the two rounds of voting, the alliance between the citizen and socialist lists was set out in a ‘governance pact’. This promised that, in the event of victory, the head of the socialist list would run for the presidency of the metropolitan institution and would leave the mayorship to the head of the Chambé Citoyenne list. In the end, the PS decided to take the mayor’s office while the head of the new municipalist list was abandoned during the campaign for the presidency of the metropolitan institution that she finally lost. For several interviewees, this is an illustration of political naivety, which has been exploited by professionals. As in Marseilles, Montpellier and Strasbourg, municipalist activists have been forced to deal with parties and with rules of the political field which have rarely turned to their advantage.

The price of internal democracy

One of the main characteristics of citizens’ lists had been the extensive use of participatory tools in order to revitalise local democracy. In retrospect, these proved to be double-edged. The rules for internal organisational processes – occupying spaces (citizens’ cafés, street meetings), using tools (sovereign general assemblies, recourses to majority judgement or voting by values) and experimenting with horizontal mechanisms for collective decision-making – were subsumed under the terms of ‘methods of collective intelligence’ or ‘permanent democracy’. These methods were intended to guarantee that every voice was considered, and thus to restore the centrality of citizens, who had been left out of the decision-making process. These choices can be explained by the age of the participants, who were often young, but also by the presence of individuals with solid skills in collective organisation (project management, communications, social engineering, human resources, etc.). In the four cases, a mistrust in politics led to democratic innovations, such as for example the implementation of mechanisms to promote transparency in how lists were drawn up. In Montpellier, #NousSommes created a special committee to explain the specific modalities of collective decision; for example, how to collectively decide whether to accept or refuse an alliance with another list or the drawing up of the list.

The primacy given to participation was carried out to the detriment of the structuring of an ideological backbone. As one of the Strasbourg Ecologiste et Citoyenne tells us:

Most of us were not politicised, in the ideological sense of the term. You could say that we are all left-wing, but there are still big differences between us. Some are radical left, others are more centrist. But there is a common culture, that of democracy, with a desire to proceed in a participatory way, with the implementation of discussion workshops. (Strasbourg, Interview with a newly-elected councillor, February 2021)

In Marseilles, the lack of debates on concrete issues and the prevalence of discussion on participatory democracy had even caused frustration among some members of the movement:

The problem is all of this lacked content. Maybe not in the democratic practices, that was not so bad. But of political content. The so-called ‘permanent democracy’, it doesn’t make a programme. I want a programme. If I commit myself, I want to commit myself to something […] We talked a lot about governance without talking about content. (Marseilles, Interview with a member of the Pacte Démocratique, January 2021)

In Montpellier, the smooth organisation and the efficiency of the ‘digital party’ (e.g. several people called ‘reactors’ had the mission of fact-checking each controversial public declaration made by the other candidates and reacting on social media) was also accompanied by an impressive turnover of the movement (proof of which was the departure of many activists after the negotiations with the centrist list). One experienced activist describes the limits of this kind of ‘digital party’ (Gerbaudo, 2019) against the experienced campaigners from traditional parties in the last weeks of the campaign:

These methods [of internal democracy] require a lot of work upstream and as a result, we were simply no longer able to be ‘agile’ by adapting to the classic context of the election. Negotiations usually take place in the last week when you have to negotiate positions with the other parties. (Montpellier, Interview with a member of #NousSommes, May 2021).

Several mechanisms were also devised to improve the involvement of participants, such as the use of internet forums designed for video game players, which offer flexibility and facilitate the division of labour. These elements, which fall under the heading of ‘platform municipalism’ (Thompson, 2021), constitute a clear break from the routine of local democracy in France. By creating trust through transparency, they tried to encourage the involvement of young people or the working classes, who had previously been excluded from local politics or had little representation in municipal democracy. In some cases, they also attempted to attract the trade unions. But the involvement of these groups was inconsistent and insufficient for reaching working-class neighbourhoods. Moreover, so much investment in the mechanisms aimed at encouraging participation and renewing democracy was often to the detriment of the construction of a common ideological base, which could have fed into a concrete programme and a deeper reflection into the content of urban policies. This member of the Chambé Citoyenne list recounts how the decision-making tools typical of ‘collective intelligence’ created difficulties: they have excluded both activists more acculturated to agonistic vision of politics and people less used to those organisational cultures:

The focus on the tools of collective intelligence may have done us a disservice […]. It did not appeal to the working classes, or to the militants of the traditional parties. I remember a young woman, a member of the Grand Chambéry Solidaire list, who was quite close to the Communist Party and who had worked at Orange, and who told me that these tools were used by the global firms in their management methods to make the employees accept whatever the management wanted. I saw a real problem of class culture, with the ‘proles’ on one side and the ‘cool greens’ on the other […]. We worked a lot on our methods. We were experts, many of us had mastered these collective intelligence tools, but for me this did not help the cause. In fact, we talked more about the tools than about the political proposal. (Chambéry, Interview, with a member of Chambé Citoyenne, May 2021)

The same problem appeared in Marseilles. It raises the question of intersectional divisions in political battles. This is illustrated by this comment from a working-class neighbourhood activist:

In our assemblies, there were different political cultures. I come from the working class. You take the floor, sometimes you shout, I recognise. It’s our way of speaking. We impose ourselves with passion. When you speak in an assembly, it is a political act in itself. And that was considered as aggressive behaviours by some people. They absolutely wanted you to applaud by doing things like that (he waves his hands). We answered ‘wait, we come here to do politics, we don’t come to do collective therapy’. (Marseilles, Interview with a member of the Pacte Démocratique, February 2021).

The focus on participation engineering and organisational techniques has thus contributed to the double weakening of new municipalism. First, it has reduced its ability to reach out to the working class, whose participation is more difficult to obtain. Secondly, it has limited the movement’s capacity to develop a counter-hegemonic project based on the construction of alternative policies in the fields of the economy, housing or the environment.

The trap of clientelism

The critique of urban entrepreneurialism has sometimes obscured the clientelist dimension of local policies. Although it is present almost everywhere, this differentiated and personalised distribution of public goods is more visible in southern French cities such as Montpellier or Marseilles (Chabal, 2014; Mattina, 2016). In these two cities, the rejection of clientelist arrangements, the denunciation of cronyism or nepotism, and a will to put the working class back at the centre of local power are central in the new municipalism discourse. For example, the programme of the Pacte Democratic in Marseille is centred on the criticism of clientelism which structures its five pillars: (1) democracy, which is qualified as ‘permanent’, through transparency, independence, the power of the citizen and the exit of the clientelist logic; (2) the unworthy housing, its eradication, and the question of housing; (3) emancipation through education policies, access to public infrastructures and to cultural spaces; (4) the right to the city, on both an urban and economic scale; and (5) radical and social ecology.

It should be recalled here that Marseilles and Montpellier’s specific political landscape is the result of 50 years of patronage. These cities’ clientelistic tradition has been covered widely by research and journalism alike, providing a text-book case of the term. To explain it briefly, in a city fuelled by post-colonial migration, the socialist mayor Georges Frêche in Montpellier, who ran the city from 1977 to the mid-2000s (Chabal, 2014), and Gaston Defferre in Marseilles (from 1953 to 1986) and his successor, Jean-Claude Gaudin (1995–2020) built a successful electoral machine (Mattina, 2016). Being all too aware of the ambiguous image of such a strong political baron, #NousSommes in Montpellier or the Pacte Démocratique in Marseilles failed to find a stable position regarding these old bosses’ heirs, oscillating between fascination (for having successfully managed the integration of successive immigration waves in the city) and repulsion (due to all the clientelism and control that had taken place through a selective distribution of resources). Such an ambiguous stance ultimately proved ineffective, since despite intensive efforts, new municipalism lists failed to penetrate neighbourhoods controlled by clientelist machines (Audemard et al., 2021; Maisetti, forthcoming).

In cities and poor neighbourhoods controlled by political machines, grassroots actions do not necessarily translate into votes. In Montpellier, those who distributed leaflets in the working-class neighbourhood long run by such machine politics came back shocked by the selling of votes and the influence of local leaders sending voting instructions by text message. The encounter with the material dimension of the voting process was sometimes brutal for young activists. Moreover, this lack of experience has itself produced material issues: for instance, the financial cost of running for office, the ability to find enough candidates or supporters with skills in campaigning. These difficulties became stronger at the end of the campaign, reinforcing the hostility of activists regarding alliances with parties and the representative democratic system. They have highlighted the fact that in this type of local configuration, municipalism has little success in attracting anyone beyond the educated middle class. In Montpellier, #NousSommes is the product of an alliance between two new fractions of the middle class (Savage, 2015): the ‘technical middle class’ and ‘emerging service workers’. Indeed, its best results were by far in mixed, gentrifying, inner-city neighbourhoods (like the one it originated in), where it secured the votes of young and highly-educated voters who mirrored the composition of the citizen’s list (Audemard et al., 2021). Gaining the vote of working-class neighbourhoods such as La Mosson had been considered crucial from the beginning, but the list ultimately failed to do so.

Conclusion: New municipalism, a (still) unachieved revolution

This excursion into the political experimentation that took place in the 2020 municipal elections has highlighted three characteristics of new municipalism in French cities. Firstly, it is undoubtedly a symptom of the urban legitimation crises as well as an attempt to resolve it. Representative democracy has run out of steam at the local level due to the lack of alternative to entrepreneurial and neoliberal urban policies (Béal and Rousseau, 2014) which the new municipalist movements seek to invent. Secondly, citizens’ lists have invested more energy in the innovation of democratic tools than in the construction of alternative urban agendas. In particular, the process of drawing up the programmes and lists has been the object of endless work. This has sometimes been detrimental for political clarity of new municipalism movements and their capacity to mobilise beyond a middle-class electorate. Thirdly, the autonomy of these lists vis-à-vis the ‘traditional’ political parties is limited. Many of the active members of these lists have or have had links with existing parties. Many of these lists have been supported, and have sometimes been promoted, by these parties. The rules of the local political game – especially the mechanism of a two-round list election – have forced alliances before the election and between the two rounds. More generally, these lists have been a tool for certain parties (EELV and LFI) to channel the political energy of social groups that challenged the local hegemony of the Socialist Party.

The article goes beyond the analysis of usual suspects – that is emblematic cases of the rise of new municipalism – to analyse local political movements that incorporated only part of the ideas and characteristics of the movement. Some of them run unsuccessfully (Chambéry); others failed to run for office (Marseilles); others decided to merge with existing parties (Montpellier); and when one of them does manage to win, the test of power takes it away from the municipalist ideals defended during the campaign (Strasbourg). Indeed, citizen’s lists elected in 2020 discovered another constraint: inter-municipal cooperation, which is increasingly important in the governance of French cities. In Strasbourg, the newly elected municipal executive had to ally itself not only with other green mayors, but also with socialists and non-partisans, in order to obtain the presidency of the Eurometropole (a metropolitan governing body incorporating 33 communes surrounding Strasbourg). In order to secure the support of the small municipalities that feared the hegemony of the central city, the choice of the candidate for the presidency fell on a non-aligned mayor from the periphery, known for her centrist and pragmatic positions. Although it is too early to know the impact of this choice on metropolitan politics, conflicts had already occurred. For the time being, the election of these new lists seems to clarify the rupture between two distinct political spaces: the politicised municipal space, in which a project of social transformation can be implemented, but in an incomplete manner; and the depoliticised metropolitan space, where pragmatic and entrepreneurial management methods continue to predominate. This, however, is just one more rule in a game that is structurally unfavourable to newcomers.

In the end, in a context of political crisis where several movements have challenged established political structures, why did the whole movement not flourish? The nature of the crisis in urban France undoubtedly played a role. It was less violent economically, especially for cities, and took the form of a crisis of legitimacy and political representation. However, the reasons for the mixed success of the new municipalism are undoubtedly to be found elsewhere, such as in the permanence of the existing political and institutional system which, despite repeated assaults, has proved particularly robust for the time being (Lefebvre, 2020; Martinache and Sawicki, 2020). Political parties continue to structure the political imagination, and municipalist activists have not succeeded in mobilising the less politically integrated social groups that have been abstaining for several decades. The weakness of French municipalism is the product of the constraints of the political field which does not prevent the arrival of newcomers, but often reduces their transformative potential. In the coming years, the situation could change if the intensification of the crisis and the decline of the parties continue to feed the construction of an alternative urban political offer. It will make French cities a good observation point for the movement’s capacity to spread and to transform cities and societies.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Vincent Béal

Notes

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