L'Espace Politique (Oct 2020)
Le vote communautaire est-il intermittent au Cameroun ?
Abstract
The article explores the links between electoral sociology and geopolitics in Africa, starting with the issue of the intermittent community vote in the victory of the Democratic People's Movement of Cameroon (CPDM) in the presidential election of 7 October 2018. This intermittent vote (Jardin, 2014) is an irregular community vote depending on the polls and territories. It is situated in a double scientific context linked firstly to a conceptual and problematic renewal of geopolitical approaches (Dussouy, 2010); this scientific context then takes into account the interdisciplinary convergences in the field of electoral studies (Gombin and Rivière, 2010; 2014). It is a matter of borrowing a geopolitical analysis approach to grasp the construction of the irregular character of the community vote in Cameroon. This irregularity depends first of all on differential abstentionism. Corresponding to the 'observation of a difference in mobilization between electors' (Dolez, 2004 : 671), this differential abstentionism has indeed a determining weight on the periodicity of the solidarity vote through the drop in participation in 2018. An analysis of the territorialised strategies of the party in power is also mobilised to complete the explanation of the control of the local vote. It is a question of paying attention to the strategies deployed by actors to conquer and preserve the national territory through votes that are contrary to the electoral sociology of territories (Gombin, 2014; Giblin, 2014) within the regional and local geopolitical systems put in place by elected officials (Subra, 2016; Bailoni, 2018). Community voting in Cameroon can be seen as an intermittent vote, i.e. a community vote that is periodic depending on the polls and the territories. This hypothesis is first inspired by the issue of intermittent voting identified by Antoine Jardin (2014) in the variations in electoral participation in Ile-de-France between 2002 and 2012. This periodic community vote then integrates the weight of the RDPC's territorialised strategies in the control of a local vote acquired by the ADD, the UDC and especially the SDF in the northern and western regions in 2018. The period between the presidential elections of 2011 and 2018 will be mobilised in this study. The intermediate legislative and municipal elections (Parodi, 2004) of 30 September 2013 will serve as a benchmark to highlight a discontinuity in the community vote in favour of the ruling party in the presidential election in October 2018, the main ballot of the Cameroonian political system. Data collected at several levels of analysis (department, region, country, abroad) by Elections Cameroon (ELECAM), the Cameroonian body in charge of organizing elections. These data will also be mobilised and supplemented by a critical analysis of the speeches and representations around the victory of the CPDM. These will be drawn from interviews with political leaders and academics, media monitoring and scientific literature on the issue. Our contribution will first focus on presenting the role of the periodicity of the community vote in the importation of electoral geopolitics in Cameroon, starting with the 2018 presidential election. After having deciphered a sociology of this partisan vote in the face of the Cameroonian crises in 2018 (Eboko and Awondo, 2018; Morelle and Owona Nguini, 2018; Owona Nguini and Menthong, 2018), our reflection will end with a geopolitical analysis of the territorial continuities and discontinuities of the intermittence of a community vote acquired by the ruling party. According to these analyses, the irregularity of the ethnic vote appears as a plural strategic vote (Blais, 2004). Moreover, this intermittent community vote demonstrates that the use of geographical reasoning is not contradictory, but complementary to the socio-anthropological readings of the vote in Africa.
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