ABSTRACT
Primary elections are a relatively recent innovation in Europe. Their application is associated with specific circumstances (timing, type of organizing party, democratic regime, etc.), and this causes a certain level of heterogeneity at the European level. In this perspective, France is an important example, since the temporal continuity of its experience with primaries, both national and local level, has made it a reference point in the framework of the studies on this topic. However, the French primary elections seem to go through a time of crisis. Indeed, they come out of the last Presidential elections with little less importance than they had when they entered the political scene. Although the failure in the latest elections of candidates drawn from the primary system is due to a set of factors both internal and external to the primary process, critical approaches regarding the adoption of primaries by the French party system caught on. The aim of this chapter is to analyse how intra-party democracy became rooted in the French political life and how it affected the profiles of the selected political personnel, both in the case of primaries used for candidate selection and chief executive candidate selection. In order to be able to do so, the chapter focuses on the political, social, and cultural milieu that led to the development of primary elections. Also, the chapter analyses the consequences of different types of candidate selection methods on the sociodemographic and political profiles of political elites in France.
