The urgent applications judge of the Conseil d’État has today directed the Minister of the Interior to consider the NUPES as a political nuance (political shade, i.e. extreme right or miscellaneous left) in its own right for the forthcoming presentation of the results of the French legislative elections to be held on 12 and 19 June 2022. He considers that counting the political parties within this coalition separately could undermine the fairness of the presentation of the electoral results.
In May, the Minister of the Interior specified the 18 political nuances to be attributed to legislative election candidates on 12 and 19 June 20221. The purpose of this list of political nuances is to aggregate the election results to inform the public and the public authorities and to highlight local and national political trends. In response to the minister's decision not to group together the political parties that have formed the New Ecological and Social Popular Union (NUPES) as a political nuance, the latter2 appealed to the urgent applications judge of the Conseil d’État.
The judge pointed out that NUPES comprises the main left-wing political parties and groups based on a shared programme and single candidacies in all constituencies and represents a political movement that will help to structure debate in the 2022 legislative elections.
The judge noted that candidates from the presidential majority will have their results counted under the single nuance of “Ensemble!” and the ecologist candidates belonging to NUPES will have theirs counted under a different nuance (“ECO”) together with other ecologist candidates who are not part of NUPES.
The judge, therefore, considered that the fairness of the presentation of the electoral results could be compromised by failure to count the votes cast for NUPES candidates under a single nuance.
For these reasons, the urgent applications judge of the Conseil d’État directed the Minister of the Interior to include NUPES in the list of nuances for legislative election candidates before 10 June 2022 to provide a fair presentation of the results of the elections to be held on 12 and 19 June.
1 Circular of 13 May 2022
2 La France Insoumise, Europe Écologie les Verts, Génération.s, Génération Écologie, Les Nouveaux Démocrates, the French Communist Party and the Socialist Party