The French regions, constituted in 1956, were originally proposed to become self-governing units by de Gaulle in 1969, as part of his failed reforms to decentralise the country. However, these would have been a different beast to what was eventually created- his proposed Regional Councils were intended as indirectly elected bodies, three-fifths elected by the General Councils (of each department) and two-fifths by municipal councils.
This, along with his proposed Senate reforms, was rejected by not only the left but a fair chunk of his supporters, most prominently Giscard d’Estaing. It strikes me as a pretty undemocratic system, all told, especially considering the departmental councils were basically just overseen by their Prefects at this time. Even so, the boundaries he proposed would stick, and as we’ll talk about in a minute, this had an important consequence for Brittany in particular.
The Mauroy government passed a significant reform decentralising power in a similar way, but a much more democratic one- the Prefects’ powers were overridden by a new system providing the administrative and regional courts to perform checks and balances, the Prefects’ executive powers were transferred to the Presidents of the Departmental Councils, and the regions were created as executives over the sets of departments assigned to them.
Now, Brittany’s regional boundaries were a bit of a sore point, because Nantes was the capital of the Duchy of Brittany and its department, Loire-Atlantique, had been formally separated from Brittany by the Vichy government. Unfortunately for the Bretons, the central government had created the Pays de la Loire region around Nantes to make it into one of France’s
métropoles d'équilibre (‘balancing metropolises’- basically its large regional cities) to counterbalance Paris, and so it was seen as closer to the Vendée, Anjou and Maine than the province it had once been the capital of.
The other reason for splitting off Brittany was that there was another city with an increasingly strong claim to being Brittany’s regional capital anyway, namely Rennes. While not as large as Nantes, Rennes rapidly developed during the 20th century, doubling in population between 1901 and 1962 and evolving into a prominent technology hub and a university town (a university which from the 1970s until 2023 was split into two, Rennes 1 and Rennes 2. Which sounds like a much less subtle version of the old university/polytechnic divide the UK has, now I think about it).
So it was that when the regions became proper administrative authorities in 1982, Brittany comprised only four of the five departments that had traditionally made up the region. The Regional Council would also be using quite a different electoral system to the system the Fifth Republic had traditionally used. Initially, in keeping with the then-favoured electoral system of the French left, it used PR, but in 2003, it was reformed into a mixed-majority system.
That system is quite an odd one; like all Fifth Republic elections except 1986, it’s held under a two-round system, and has a threshold to eliminate underperforming parties from the second round (in this case any party getting over 10% of the vote region-wide advances, and any list getting over 5% can combine with an advancing list). No seats are awarded in the first round unless a list gets at least 50% of the vote, and shockingly, since this is France, that doesn’t happen often.
In the second round, whatever list gets the most votes gets a majority bonus (called a
prime majoritaire, ‘majority premium’, in French) making up 25% of the votes in most regions, 20% in Martinique and French Guiana and 18% in Corsica, and the remaining 75% of seats get divided proportionally among the parties advancing it to the second round.
To the best of my knowledge, that means 21 of the Regional Council’s 83 seats were assigned to the PS by the
prime majoritaire, so I planned to assign these proportionately based on the voteshares and seat allocations by department, only to find that proportionally only 17 seats seem above the threshold of what they would’ve won without it. This is probably just my horrendous maths biting me in the arse again, to be fair; any clarification or corrections would be welcome.
Getting onto the electoral politics of the region, Brittany has gradually become a firmly left-wing region since the 1980s. This is somewhat odd considering it was for centuries one of the biggest strongholds of French Catholicism, but not only has secularised a lot as it has urbanised, its affinity for Christian democracy under the Fourth Republic made it a fairly poor fit for Gaullism once that asserted itself as the dominant side of the French right.
Indeed, this affinity for Christian democracy is said in some scholars’ analysis of French politics, most prominently Le Bras and Todd, to be down to ‘zombie Catholicism’; while its contemporary are more lapsed, they argue, the ideals of Christian democracy make it more sympathetic to contemporary centre-left ideals than the hardline neoliberalism and social conservatism of the right. Of course, this is just one explanation; another might be that the big and growing cities like Rennes and Brest have come to overshadow the conservative countryside and provincial towns like Saint-Malo or Vannes, and a further one might be that growing cultural consciousness of Breton nationalism has manifested in more trust and support for the left in a similar manner to the longtime support of Scotland and Wales for it.
In any case, the 2021 election saw the PS-led coalition
La Bretagne avec Loïg (‘Brittany with Loïg’, named after current President of the Regional Council Loïg Chesnais-Girard; apparently the name Loïg doesn’t have any meaning other than sort of sounding Breton) running for re-election, having won an absolute majority in 2015 due to the majority bonus. The alliance includes the PS, PCF, divers gauche politicians and the regionalist
Pour le Bretagne! (‘For Brittany!’) party.
They were challenged by an assortment of coalitions, their main opponents being the LR-led coalition
Hissons haut la Bretagne (roughly meaning ‘Let’s raise Brittany high’), led by Isabelle le Callennec, the EELV-led coalition
Bretagne d’avenir (‘Brittany of the future’) led by Claire Desmares-Poirrier, the RN-led coalition
Un Bretagne forte (‘a strong Brittany’) led by Giles Pennelle, the En Marche-led list
Nous la Bretagne (‘we Brittany’), which actually didn’t seem to have a leader (possibly because they were part of the government before the election, though they ran separately this time), and the LFI-led list
Bretagne Insoumise (‘Brittany unbowed’, but I feel like I don’t really need to translate it) led by Pierre-Yves Caladen.
(On an unrelated note, the auto-translator on Firefox tried to translate all of those names with some spectacular results I want to share- Hissons haut la Bretagne came out as ‘Let’s go out locust Britain’, Bretagne d’avenir as ‘Britain of the future’ and Bretagne Insoumise as ‘Insurmallowed Brittany’!)
The election turned out to be a close race, with the PS-led list topping the polls by only 4 points over the LR-led one and all the aforementioned lists except the LFI one clearing the 10% threshold comfortably. The non-aligned ecologist list
Bretagne ma vie (‘Brittany my life’) aligned itself with the PS-led list, having won 6.5% of the vote while the LFI one, despite also clearing the 5% threshold to combine with another list, chose not to do so.
In the second round, the PS list came comfortably ahead with almost 30% of the vote, while the LR list took almost 22% and the EELV one cleared 20%. Both the En Marche and RN lists declined by around 1%, but this was still enough to take 9 and 8 seats respectively. Unusually, while the PS list did receive the
premium majoritaire, having lost around 6% of the popular vote from 2015 they only took 40 seats, 2 short of an overall majority.
To the best of my understanding, Chesnais-Girard has regained its majority, which I believe is because the Green list somehow imploded after the election and some groups supporting it joined the government, but again I could be totally wrong. Then again, it is the French Greens, so I think it’s a solid guess.
A little annoyingly, right after finishing mapping the election based on the lists, I realised the French Wikipedia page for the Regional Council tells you exactly who sits for what seat and what party they’re in. But it doesn’t indicate who was elected by the
premium majoritaire and it’s unclear how the lists were aligned from my cursory look (besides obviously alternating between men and women, since that’s an electoral provision of the system too), so for now I'm sticking with the division by lists. Though I could go back to try and distinguish it if people are interested.
) As I said, 
