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THE EVOLUTION OF FRENCH POLITICAL COMMUNICATION | 151

Another interesting consequence of the 1990 law was an increased need to recruit new
party militants and activists on a more regular basis. Before its enforcement, direct
marketing had rather loosened the link between parties and political activists and
militants: the ‘direct communication’ between campaigning politicians and the citizen
apparently established by modern media had by-passed them and had been
discouraging them by making them somehow redundant. In contrast, the 1990 law, by
forcing politicians to organise more meetings across their constituencies, has amplified
the need to get the support of strong local networks of local militants able to greet
campaigners, to bring sympathisers to the meetings, to help organise them and also to
give clues of local specificities so that the politicians’ speeches appear to address the
needs of each particular audience. This has remotivated political activism and
strengthened parties or politicians to try to benefit from a dense network of local
supporters.

These attempts to revitalise the militant structures were even more obvious at the
beginning of 2005 when three of the main political parties, the Socialist Party, the UDF
(Union pour la Démocratie Française) and the UMP (Union pour un Mouvement
3
Populaire) started a campaign to recruit a new kind of ‘temporary’ militant . For the
Socialist Party, the ‘projects members’ should be allowed to enroll without any previous
screening by established militants cells, and even to do so online on the Socialist Party
Website. They would just need to pay a symbolic flat fee instead of the high fee in
proportion to income paid by the ‘regular’ party activists. But they will only be able to
take part in the elaboration of the Socialist Party’s new electoral programme, and won’t
be able to vote for the choice of the Socialist Party candidates in the future elections,
for instance, unless they decide to become ‘full’ militants and are accepted as such. In
the same way, the UMP plans to establish a new category of ‘partner militants’, exempt
from dues, and only able to take part in the debates on issues and programmes. Finally,
the UDF plans to stabilise some of its non-affiliated ‘companions’by enrolling them, in a The Evolution of French Political Communication: Reaching the Limits of Professionalisation?
similar pattern,as ‘associated militants’.

By increasing the number of public meetings, the 1990 Law has also forced politicians
to return to a stricter application of the old method of the ‘Unique Selling Proposition
or Point’
or Point (USP) transposed from the marketing techniques:when all is said and done,the
USP is the best way of maintaining a clear and strong image. Jacques Chirac’s 1995
campaign, led by his daughter, Claude Chirac, has clearly demonstrated this. She
devised a clever targeting of the left with a political programme mainly intended to
reduce the so-called ‘fracture sociale’, (social breach) between rich and poor. It worked
by being incessantly repeated to the crowds,as perfectly as Bill Clinton had done for his
two campaigns’USP on economics.

Lionel Jospin’s unexpected 2002 debacle:too much professionalisation?
While the Law had not really managed to constrain political communication, even if it
was without any doubt influencing its ways, professionalisation probably came to find 153