What political design looks like in France
Their political culture is driven by the street, not TV or digital ads
French President Emmanuel Macron won reelection Sunday, defeating far-right National Assembly candidate Marine Le Pen to become the first French president to win a second term in 20 years.
French presidential campaigns don’t have the same budgets or design needs as U.S. presidential campaigns. And although they sometimes rip off visual design trends from the U.S., their political culture is driven by the street, not TV or digital ads.
Here’s five thing I learned about what politics looks like in France following their presidential campaign:
1. Campaigns are price capped and publicly financed
French presidential candidates can spend a maximum of the equivalent of about $23.8 million if they make it to the run-off, and the state reimburses a percentage of campaign costs. Compare that to the price tag of presidential campaigns in the U.S. In 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden raised more than $1 billion, and former President Donald Trump raised about $774 million.
“That limits what you can do and the people that you can hire,” said Clement Favaron, a student at Sciences Po Grenoble, and design and communications don’t always fit the budget. But there also isn’t the same need for fundraising and advertising.
Businesses have been banned from making political donations in France since 1995, and individual donor contributions are limited to donating €7,500 per year to parties and an additional €4,600 to candidates, according to France 24, the French state-owned news network.
In the U.S., voters are inundated by a barrage of advertisements pressuring them to vote in the final days of a campaign. In contrast, French voters just observed a period of "silence électoral,” an election silence that began last Friday before the Sunday election, in which candidates are barred from campaigning and the news media is prohibited from quoting candidates or publishing poll results.
2. Posters are everything
Without the need for big budget TV buys or A/B tested digital ads, the emphasis for French candidates is posters and mailers.
Wheat-paste posters are posted publicly, and the designs tend to feature a well-lit portrait of the candidate with slogans set in a sans-serif font. The posters for the last three winning campaigns all stuck to the same script:
Posters are inevitably vandalized, and graffiti is part of political street culture. Posters this year were vandalized with messages like “Fascist,” “5 years is already too much!,” and “Give the cash back,” according to AFP.
Campaigns do have limited digital asset needs, like for their own social media accounts, and many also have online campaign shops, though “the media talks about it because it’s fun, but then no one really buys it,” Favaron said.
3. Slogans are more important than logos
U.S. candidates are all about their logos, but in France, corporate-style logos and consistent visual branding aren’t the focus.
Le Pen’s campaign had the closest thing to an American-style single-letter logo with this “M la France” mark, but it wasn’t applied across her campaign with the sort of consistency we see for U.S. presidential candidates.
Instead, campaigns are known for their slogans.
“Some slogans become very closely associated with candidates,” said Harvey Feigenbaum, a professor of political science at George Washington University. One of the best known is “La force tranquille” or “The quiet force” for François Mitterrand, the first socialist French president, who was in office from 1981-1995.
Macron used the taglines “Nous tous” or “All of us” and “Emmanuel Macron avec vous,” or “Emmanuel Macron with you” in his posters this year, and Le Pen used “Pour tous les Français,” or “For all French” and “Femme d’etat” or “Stateswoman.”
4. It’s influenced by the American left
Among the candidates that lifted the “AOC slant” from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are Communist and Paris council member Ian Brossat and Marseille deputy mayor Sebastien Barles. But they aren’t the only French politicians who look to Democrats and progressive design in the U.S. for inspiration.
Macron’s campaign sold shirts, keychains, and water bottles this year that say “Emmanuel Macron avec vous” in a sans-serif font in red, blue, and cyan. The stacked text looks suspiciously like Hillary Clinton’s “Love trumps hate” design from the 2016 campaign.
Christiane Taubira is a former French Minister of Justice who ran as a leftist unity presidential candidate. Her campaign social media account looked like it was inspired by Democrats in the U.S., with an “AOC slant”-style logo and color palette similar to what we’ve seen from candidates like Vice President Kamala Harris and Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
5. There’s nuance to patriotism
Macron and Le Pen both embraced the French flag, but there are differences in how they and their supporters express love of country.
At Macron’s final speech last week, supporters waved French flags alongside E.U. flags, and during last week’s debate, Macron criticized Le Pen’s proposed Muslim headscarf ban as an affront to French Enlightenment values.
“France, the home of the Enlightenment and universalism, will become the first country in the world to ban religious symbols in public spaces,” Macron said. “That’s what you’re proposing. It doesn’t make sense.”
I didn’t find wire photos of E.U. flags at Le Pen’s rallies. She ran on an agenda Feigenbaum called a French version of “America First,” and the favored national female personification among Le Pen’s National Front party is Joan of Arc, as opposed to Marianne, the more contemporary symbol of the French Republic.
