YOU HAVE to be lost, or determined, to find Maubourguet, a town of 2,300 people on the old road from Bordeaux to the Pyrenees, about an hour north of Lourdes in the département of the Hautes Pyrénées.
The area has moved towards France’s Socialist Party over the years under the effective guidance of mayor Jean Guilhas. Largely rural, with maize fields stretching towards the snow-capped mountains to the south, the area has quite an industrial sector.
In France’s first open primary, 3,900 voters from 11 local communes were invited to express their preference between six Socialist candidates vying to face Nicolas Sarkozy in next May’s presidential election.
These are people who would normally vote in their local mairie but who, for the primaries, were offered a single polling station in the town’s old secondary school. Some of those who made the effort did so with a rueful smile as they voted in one of their former classrooms.
Some 322 of them came out to vote and contributed at least €1 to help defray the costs. At a tad over 8 per cent, the turnout was slightly lower than the estimated national average.
Old and young, they duly presented some form of identity, signed a charter of left values, selected their ballot papers, passed through the polling booth and signed again before depositing their envelope in the clear perspex ballot box.
They then had the option of using an electronic pen to leave their co-ordinates with the PS. The pen recorded names, addresses and e-mails. Ten thousand such pens across France will be downloaded to provide a campaign list which, if the Maubourguet experience is anything to go by, will include some 300,000 sympathisers.
The local party members had discussed whether or not voters should be thanked for their efforts.
With a logic that Descartes would certainly have approved of, the decision came down in favour of so doing.
While voters have a republican duty to vote in elections, their participation in a primary represented an additional democratic effort.
This effort earned them a pleasant word of gratitude from the volunteers who staffed the chilly station from nine in the morning to seven in the evening.
They came in a steady trickle, the inveterate few waiting outside just before nine. A handful of Mass-goers combined religious practice with a desire for greater democracy. Later a few would even violate the sanctity of a French Sunday lunch to vote.
As night fell across the Place de la Libération and the floodlights picked out the tower of the 11th century Romanesque church, polling station president Nathalie Salabert announced the end of voting.
The polling box gave up its secrets: François Hollande on 36 per cent, Martine Aubry on 29 per cent, and feisty Arnaud Montebourg clocking 16 per cent.
Next Sunday will see the run-off round, and Maubourguet won’t finish voting until June.