Marine Le Pen’s far-right party is the biggest beneficiary of French discontent by President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to encourage an increase in the retirement age, according to a survey by the polling institute Ifop for the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche.
If general elections were held on Sunday, 26% of 1,094 adults polled online on March 20-21 said they would support the candidates in Le Pen’s National Rally.. That was five points up from the previous poll in November ahead of a series of strikes and protests over unpopular pension reforms.
A party group supporting Macron would get the votes of 22% of those polled, five points down. Politicians from the Nupes alliance of left and green parties would get 26 percent despite their strong mobilization against Macron’s reform, just one point more than in November.
“The big lesson is that the National Rally is in the lead; it’s outrageous,” Frederic Dabi, head of Ifop, told JDD. “He has a general voting platform. There are almost no categories where it is very weak, except for senior executives, where it only scores 13%.
Millions of people have joined nationwide strikes and demonstrations against pension reforms since mid-January This also includes raising the retirement age by two years to 64. Macron has held his own, again insisting last week that changes are needed to preserve the system. and protect public finances.
The protests intensified after the law was enforced, using Article 49.3 of the French Constitution to bypass a vote in the National Assembly when the matter became clear The government, which lost an outright majority in last June’s election, did not have the support it expected from conservative Republican lawmakers.
Skirmishes with riot police have broken out in major cities. which has often led to the use of tear gas and water cannon to disperse crowds. Thousands of tons of rubbish have piled up on the streets of Paris and several rubbish bins have been set on fire as a result of the refuse collectors’ strike.
Dozens of people were injured in clashes between security forces and protesters in western France on Saturday in an unauthorized protest against the construction of large water tanks for agriculture. Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin spoke of the extreme violence of the ultra-left and the extreme left.
Government spokesman Olivier Veran, In an interview with the JDD, he acknowledged that the protesters were angry and said their voices had to be heard.
“While many are protesting the pension reform, others are also doing so because of their purchasing power or because they have less access to public services,” he said. French inflation accelerated to a euro-era record of 7.2% in February, boosted by food and services costs.
Veran added that other reforms would follow, some of which, like the pension plan, would be unpopular.
The strongest support for Le Pen outside of his own party loyalties was among voters with no political affiliation, with nearly a third saying they would back a Rally National candidate, according to Ifop.
In the meantime, young people have turned to the nupes and, to a lesser extent, to the far right, the poll found. Just 12% of those under 35 said they would vote for candidates from Macron’s group, the Renaissance, Modern and Horizons parties, compared to 31% of those over 65.
Veran said that young people are particularly opposed to the use of Article 49.3. This led to no-confidence votes in parliament on March 20, which nearly overthrew Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne’s government. “For them, it just fuels distrust in our institutions and in those who represent them in general,” he said.
In the first round of the French general elections in June Macron’s group received 26.9% support, ahead of Nupes at 26.3% and national association with 19.2%. The margin of error in the Ifop survey was around 2.5-2.8 points.