If Marine Le Pen is getting closer to outgoing President Emmanuel Macron in the polls, she has already won the elections on Facebook. According to data collected by Bfmtv using the CrowdTangle tool, the March Rassemblement National candidate was the one who got the highest number of interactions, over 3 million, an alltime record since the campaign began, while Macron didn’t go over 671,300. Over the entire analysis period from December 1st to March 31st, Le Pen garnered over 7 million interactions versus 2.2 million for the outgoing president.
In March, for the first time, Le Pen managed to outperform his direct rival on the far right, Eric Zemmour, an undisputed star on social media who received 2.3 million interactions in the past month, followed by dominating candidate Nicolas Dupont Aignan , another platform star at 2 million despite only 2.5 vote intentions. On social media, the other big winner is the French extreme right, now a consolidated success on Facebook.
For the month of March, the trio of Le Pen, Zemmour and DupontAignan is followed by the radical left candidate JeanLuc Mèlenchon (1.5 million interactions), while Macron is in fifth place. According to the global ranking of the Bfmtv, as of December 1st, the polemicist Zemmour, candidate of the Reconquete party, achieved the best score on social media with a total of about 8.5 million interactions, followed by Le Pen with 7 and Dupont Aignan with 6 .1 million, Mèlenchon with 3.8 and Macron with 2.2. The post that drew the most reactions and shares in March is that of the sovereign of Debout la France with a video in which he denounced the “emotional blackmail” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after his speech to French parliamentarians on March 23 . The second most popular publication was Zemmour’s reaction to the March 3 announcement of Macron’s candidacy.