Player is loading
On Sunday we vote for the second round of the French presidential elections. Like last time, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen came to the vote in 2017. In some overseas departments and communes, the vote will be brought forward by one day, i.e. to April 23, to take account of the time difference. Preliminary results will be announced in the evening, starting at 8pm when the last spots are closed, and the count should happen fairly quickly, as usually happens in the second round.
The inauguration of the new President must then take place no later than the last day of the outgoing President’s term of office or 13 May.
What the polls tell us, beyond the numbers
In the 2017 vote, Macron received twice as many votes as Le Pen, while today polls show the gap between the two is much narrower. Some say the far-right candidate is just eight points separating the outgoing president, while others give Macron a slightly larger lead.
The research, commissioned by Le Monde and published on April 20 – that is, before the televised debate between Macron and Le Pen, which ended in Macron’s favor – involved more than 12,000 people, a fairly large sample, and the margin of error is very small. at around 1.1 percent. Macron received 56% against Le Pen’s 44, and respondents were very confident of his votes: 93% against 89 of those who intended to vote for Marine Le Pen. However, Le Monde warns that caution is needed as the data poses various difficulties for the outgoing president.
First of all, the extreme right has never been stronger: its three candidates (Marine Le Pen, Éric Zemmour and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan) received more than 32 percent of the vote in the first ballot, and Le Pen has never been so high in voting days . Le Pen’s first-round result, which added two points from 2017, seems even more remarkable given that for the first time he had competition within his own political space. Despite his three candidacies, the extreme right has clearly advanced.
The second risk for the outgoing President is being re-elected “for want of something better” and winning above all because voters and electricians are mobilizing against Le Pen without, however, sticking to his project with conviction.
In short, the favorable data for Macron may mask either a lack of enthusiasm or resignation. When respondents were asked what the reasons for their election were, 36 percent of Macron voters said they wanted to vote for the outgoing president “because they trust him,” 25 because Macron is “closest to his ideas and 39 to to block that”. Away for the other candidate”. The main motivation is therefore to block Marine Le Pen.
According to the forecasts, a similar mechanism will also occur in favor of the right-wing extremist candidate, but with the difference that the highest percentage of motivation for her is proactive and not contrary.
The third weakness of the electoral favorite is that he seems unattached to some of the French’s concerns. Emmanuel Macron is perceived as less able to understand people’s problems (25% vs. Marine Le Pen’s 46) and seems less willing to change things than the far-right candidate (41% vs. 63).
Macron, on the other hand, compensates for these weaknesses with a much stronger presidency position (64% vs. Le Pen’s 39%). 62% believe it is capable of dealing with a serious crisis (vs. 34 for the Rassemblement National candidate) and 61% believe it is capable of projecting a good image of France abroad (26 for the candidate RN).
In all of this, the abstention promises to be meaningful. 79% of respondents say they are interested in the campaign, down 6 points from when they researched the second round five years ago. Finally, 24% say they don’t want either of the two candidates who landed in the poll to win.
Neither Macron nor Le Pen
Various candidates have expressly stated that they will vote for Macron. Among them: Valerie Pécresse of the centre-right Les Républicains (4.78% in the first ballot), Yannick Jadot, the ecological candidate (4.63%), the communist Fabien Roussel (2.28) and the socialist Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris (1.75).
However, this is a rather small and not very solid pool of votes: the collapse of the historic parties in French politics deprives Macron of an almost automatic vote transfer. Marine Le Pen instead has a guaranteed reserve of votes, unlike Macron: that of Éric Zemmour, the far-right candidate, who received 7.05%, and that of Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (2.06% in the first ballot).
The real unknown for Macron will be the followers and supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who in the last five years has mobilized very strongly against the outgoing president’s economic, social or health policies and whose youth side has also spoken between the first and second round with protests and occupations of schools and universities. The far-left political sphere is now worth 21.95%, effectively becoming the arbiter of the confrontation between Le Pen and Macron.
According to the April 19 Ipsos survey, only 39% of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s supporters will vote for Macron: 16% say they will vote for Le Pen, while 45 want to abstain.
The logical consequence of this situation is that abstention promises meaning. The number of people who say they are “certain” and “almost certain” that they will vote is 79% or 5 points lower than in 2017.
What did Macron and Le Pen do?
Between the first round and the second round, the President actually launched his own campaign, which he had somehow dodged up until that moment due to Presidential responsibilities. He has also multiplied his meetings and travels in areas unfavorable to him, especially where Le Pen is strongest or where the extreme left is very strong.
If Macron had presented himself as independent in 2017 and avoided any definition (he said he was “neither right nor left”), he had plunged a section of the moderate left, whose voices he had collected, into a crisis when he was president it has moved decisively to the right and has already garnered a large proportion of the confidence of those who had been referring to this policy area up to that point.
The votes he now needs to win are therefore predominantly left-wing, and it is to voters and to left-wing electricians and environmentalists that Macron has been reaching out over the past two weeks. For example, during his speech on April 16th in Marseille, he spoke of “ecological design” and also “of a common future”, referring directly to the expressions used by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He took a few steps back on the originally proposed pension reform, one of the big issues dear to the right in his program, changed his stance on teachers’ salaries (extending a possible raise to everyone), and emphasized consensus with Mélenchon and Jadot on the subject of ecology.
Her other strategy was to bring Marine Le Pen (albeit keen to get an idea of balance and credibility) into her political arena, that of the extreme right, and reiterate that the radicalism of her program had not changed everything, despite appearances. Macron has summoned all those affected by his opponent’s nationalist threat and presents himself as the sole bulwark against that threat.
The same strategy, but on the contrary, was pursued by Le Pen, who, after working for his own normalization and successfully defeating the televised confrontation with Macron, has rediscovered the tones and attitudes of the past in recent days.
At his last meeting, on Thursday April 21 in Arras, in the Pas-de-Calais department, Le Pen focused on personality after listing the “faults” of Macron’s mandate and his “catastrophic” results on the economic front outgoing President, who unreservedly attacks him with a great deal of aggression and focuses his speech on issues he had not insisted on at all during the election campaign: immigration and the defense of French identity.
The parliamentary elections
In France, the President of the Republic has many powers, but to exercise them fully he needs a majority in the National Assembly, the Parliament. In fact, the president appoints the prime minister and, on his proposal, the ministers: for this reason, the general elections, to be held in two rounds on June 12 and 19, will be particularly delicate and important for the winner.
In the past, it happened several times that the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister belonged to different parties (so-called “cohabitation”). Most recently between 1997 and 2002 when President Jacques Chirac was leader of the centre-right party and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was leader of the Socialist Party. In this situation, the powers of the President of the Republic are very limited, to the point, some experts argue, of making France a de facto parliamentary republic.
The presidential victory is therefore a necessary step for Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, but far from sufficient. Almost all of the measures promised by the two candidates can actually only be implemented if the person who becomes president also obtains a majority in the national assembly in the parliamentary elections.
In recent days, Mélenchon has launched his own election campaign, calling on the French to ‘elect’ him as prime minister by voting for the coalition he chairs: ‘The general elections next June are like a third round’ he said and bet everything on a future of living together. His strategy is to “convince the teetotalers” who don’t want either Macron or Le Pen, and the various forces on the left, who presented themselves separately for the presidential elections, in order to unite a common program. Negotiations are already underway.