Compromise, party management and fair shares. The case of the French UDF’, Party Politics 5(2

The French UDF has failed in its attempt to become a party capable of dominating the right at the expense of the Gaullist RPR. It is best regarded as an underdeveloped party which has difficulty in acting as a unitary organization. This failure is due to the exceptional historical and institutional context of its birth but also to the preference of its leaders for their existing organizations. To preserve these they have elaborated a sophisticated and measurable system of compromise between them-selves and with the RPR which guarantees significant rewards. This underdeveloped status will probably continue indefinitely. In a wider context the UDF's failure sheds light on the difficulty of creating genuinely new partisan organizations. KEY WORDS _ elections _ France _ party management _ restricted competition _ UDF The Union pour la Democratie fran<;:aise (UDF) is puzzling to the student of parties. Standard accounts see it as a significant system party, created by the electoral mechanisms of the Fifth Republic (Wilson, 1982; Charlot, 1989). One recent analyst classifies it unproblematically as a 'centre-right party with strong roots in liberalism ' (Ware, 1996: 49). But an early study warned that whatever its ambitions, the UDF was still only a federation of bour-geois parties plus a group of deputies (Seiler, 1980: 206). Cole feels that it is 'best understood as a modern expression of the Orleanist tradition, modified to suit the Fifth Republic', but suggests that its internal diversity gives it 'the weakest claim to be a coherent political entity' (Cole, 1990: 106, 120). The former leader of the UDF parliamentary group, Gilles de Robien, wondered despairingly if it was more than 'a data ban