Once Again, From a Distance: Martinique and the French Presidential Election of 2007

Abstract

Who won the 2007 French presidential elections? For sure, with 53 percent of the vote, Nicolas Sarkozy decisively took over the reigns of the Fifth Republic from Jacques Chirac, his allied nemesis of the Union for a Popular Majority (UMP). But from the perspective of the territories, a mirror image of the vote emerged: from the Antilles to the Indian Ocean, Socialist candidate Segolene Royal convincingly trumped Sarkozy with an overall score of nearly 56 percent. Does this mean that a leftist of France is fundamentally marginalized from the more Gaullist (if not Gallic) body politic? Do the electoral outcomes herald a more formal separation from metropolitan France? Did candidate Sarkozy's campaign remarks about inner city or immigrant scum ( racaille ) who have to be industrially cleansed (Karcher) indelibly alienate France's citizens of color? The political and electoral reality of France is much more complex, nuanced, and paradoxical than the above questions suggest. In fact, there is no single overseas population to speak of: each of the nine departements and territoires has its own unique ethno-historical background, political culture, and resulting electoral dynamics. In this article I shall concentrate on one of these paradoxical polities: the West Indian island of Martinique. This focus does not imply that electoral outcomes in Martinique typify that of France as a whole. For all its particularities, the Martinican case does, however, highlight the systematic ambivalence that characterizes the relationship between French departments and the French democratic republic in a postcolonial era.