Nearly 70 of the metropolitan area’s 96 departments are on alert, 11 of them on red alert, over the extreme heat of the earliest recorded heatwave on Gallic soil, on a day when thermometers topped 40 degrees Celsius in various places.
The traditional day of reflection on the eve of an election seems hectic and with an unexpected protagonist, as if one should add no fewer ingredients to the apathy, disinterest and disillusionment.
In the first round of the most important general election to determine France’s political body for the next five years, 25 million voters stayed at home, 52.4 percent of the list, while more than half a million canceled their ballots or left them blank.
Nothing will change whoever wins; I will vote, but empty; and there are more important things right now like the high cost of living, these were phrases collected over the past few days that explain the anything but flattering forecasts for the second round of general elections.
Polls released up to yesterday, ahead of the end of the campaign and the deadlock that began at midnight, showed higher abstention than in the first round on June 12.
According to a poll by the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP) with Fiducial for the media LCI and Sud Radio, 53 percent of those registered would miss the election, with other studies pointing to a worse scenario.
The abstention record dates back to the 2017 general election, when it ended with 57.36 percent, which it could reach tomorrow.
The government alliance Together and its main competitor, the coalition of left-wing forces New People’s Ecological and Social Union (Nupes), did everything they could to lure the undecided and the disgruntled about the situation in the country to their camp, without much success in the polls.
Today in France people are talking about elections, but not in the way politicians would like and at the moment the heat wave is occupying spaces that nobody here expected.
With much at stake tomorrow, President Emmanuel Macron has spent the last few days asking his compatriots to guarantee him an outright majority in the National Assembly, at least 289 of the 577 MPs, to push ahead with his programs and promises.
“Nothing would be worse than adding French disorder to world disorder,” he was heard saying Tuesday before traveling to Romania, Moldova and Ukraine.
The opposite came from the opposition sector, with leaders like Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his call to vote for Nupes to prevent the implementation of Macron’s policies, including raising the retirement age to 65.
The temperatures tomorrow will not be so warm, the forecasts say goodbye to the heat wave, but the political environment will be hot, even if the electoral absentee dominates again on Gallic soil.
One piece of information is enough as a thermometer, since the reversal of the election calendar in 2000, first the presidential elections and then the parliamentary elections, the elected president and his supporters have always gained absolute control over the lower house.
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