Johann Hari: We have much to learn from the French

I am about to write the most unpopular, most heretical words any British person can ever write: mes amis, we must be more like the French. No, I don't mean we should elect a nasty, Napoleonic little thug to slash social programmes and crack down on immigrants. The French presidential election campaign that ended last night has been a flaming, flaring model of democratic re-engagement, drawing 85 per cent of French citizens to the ballot box and grabbing TV ratings as high as the World Cup.

Compare that to the 38 per cent who dribbled into the polling stations of England last week, or to the measly three million who watched the BBC's major election interviews in 2005.

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Britain has neverseen a turnout as high as France's this week. Even at the peak of our political participation in 1950, we fell a percentage-point short. So let's look across La Manche and ask: how did the French do it?

Turnout-Enticer One: Everybody's vote mattered. In a French presidential election, the country acts as one vast constituency, so a vote in a sure-to-be-Socialist suburb counts just as much as a vote in a marginal, could-go-either-way district. Politicians have to concentrate their energy on all areas, all the time.

In Britain, by contrast, we have a dirty secret: the vast majority of voters don't count. Most of us live in safe seats, so we are safely ignored. It makes no difference if a solid Labour seat like Sedgefield is won by 1,000 votes or 20,000; politicians have no incentive to drive up turnout there. So they concentrate almost exclusively on the half a million voters who live in middle-class, Middle-England swing seats, and tailor everything they say to their whims. The rest of us, uncourted and unrepresented, turn off. The election theme for every party, every election, should be "It Don't Mean a Thing if it Ain't Got That Swing".

France has seen amazing grassroots campaigns - led by Aclefeu (pronounced Assez le feu: no more burning) - to persuade the bainlieues, the concrete rings of poverty that circle French cities, to vote, vote, vote. Registration has soared 10 per cent in the areas that erupted in the 2005 bonfire of the car-and-vanities.

France's rappers, such as Rost, have been able to tell the residents that they might just swing the election against Nicolas Sarkozy, their sworn enemy, the man who dubbed them "racaille" - scum. In Britain, it's hard to get much traction for similar campaigns, such as Operation Black Vote, because the votes of minorities and the poor are rarely in swing districts. Bluntly, under our voting system, they can't make a difference.

The late Robin Cook said the best argument for introducing proportional representation was that it would make the votes of the poor count again, and force politicians to court them. This French election has shown that when they are engaged with, and have real electoral power, the hard-to-reach poor will vote, and in massive numbers.

Turnout-Enticer Two: The voters had a clear choice. As Tony Blair tells us, this is the age of choice, where you expect to pick from 30 brands of toilet paper before you wipe. But when it comes to our political choices, our options are still binary - thanks, in part, to Blair's failure to hold the referendum on PR he promised in 1997. The French, by contrast, had a delicious menu of choices on the first ballot, ranging from the anarchist-left farmer José Bové to the fascist-right Jean-Marie Le Pen. If you couldn't find somebody approximating your beliefs among those 12, you are an eccentric person indeed.

Turnout-Enticer Three: The issues were not trivialised. People have very little time to dedicate to learning about politics. They need to know what their choices are, in plain language. That is what the French press has provided them with throughout this campaign.

In Britain and the US, by contrast, a voter has to fight against a tsunami of trivia and disinformation to find out anything. They have to hear endless Westminster village gossip about the Blair/ Brown row or the sex lives of Blunkett and Boris. Most just give up, unaware of their choices and assuming the political conversation has nothing to do with them.

The French have put in place protections to help ensure democratic politics is not cheapened in this way. They have strict privacy laws, so that even the fact that M. Sarkozy's wife, Celia, appears to have left him on the day of the big presidential debate has not been discussed. They have a ban on opinion polls in the immediate run-up to polling day, to ensure the debate stays focused on the issues and not on the horse race. It works.

I sympathise with the people who react to our low turnout by calling for Aussie-style compulsory voting, but that treats the symptom, not the disease of disengagement. The French have shown us there is another way: if you give people serious politics, they will take it seriously. Alors, oui, il faut qu'on ressemble davantage aux Français. Ça va?

j.hari@independent.co.uk

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