French presidential election, 2022

[Coldstream]

As we were discussing 2 months ago, now it's become clear that only 3 candidates will have a large number of votes: Macron, Le Pen and Mélenchon. The others will have single digit. In the final days, some candidates atract useful votes.

Melenchon is still in quite a distant third. And I don’t think you can rule out Pecresse getting ahead of him by the end if Zemmour continues to slide.

Looking at Pécresse campaign, through, I think the question for her is below or above 10%. Same for Zemmour.

The votes Zemmour is losing have to go somewhere, and they are a lot more likely to go to Pecresse than Melenchon.

[Coldstream]

https://www.bfmtv.com/politique/elections/presidentielle/presidentielle-jamais-l-ecart-n-a-ete-aussi-faible-entre-macron-et-le-pen-au-second-tour_AN-202203300424.html

Does Marine Le Pen win this time?

I feel like Macron is arrogant and off-putting enough that Le Pen has an outside chance, and I think if her name wasn’t Le Pen she’d be in with a much better chance, but as it stands I still think her chances are pretty minimal.

[Coldstream]

Let's not beat around the bush here. A Le Pen presidency would be an unmitigated disaster. Absolutely not what the western world needs right now.

Agreed. Macron is awful, the alternatives are even worse.

[Coldstream]

You can ban me all you want. You're just showing how intolerant you all are.

This is eerily similar to the trajectory of the Brexit vote, except Macron is doing about 5 points better on average. Brexit won by 3.8%. Two and half weeks, we'll see if it gets any closer or if Macron can get back into more comfortable territory. I would still say Macron is the favorite, but first-round results will tell us a lot.





Btw, I don't use "globalist" in a derogatory way. Many people proudly call themselves that, and those people are clearly scared of Le Pen winning. And they probably should be at this point. A Le Pen win would be another damning indictment of the "rules-based international order" and the popularity of NATO/EU.

Le Pen winning would be a damning indictment of Emmanuel Macron, not the EU or NATO. Particularly since Le Pen isn’t even campaigning to leave the EU anymore.

The danger of a Le Pen presidency is what she will do to the Muslim & other immigrant populations in France, not her international impact which would be marginal. It’s not like Macron has been a huge help to NATO anyway. And even on NATO Le Pen has moderated.

[Coldstream]

It’d be interesting to see what a Le Pen cabinet might look like, there’s not exactly a plethora of talent in RN so she’d probably have to reach out to Zemmour & LR types, but would she even want them if they don’t back her in R2?

[Coldstream]

It’d be interesting to see what a Le Pen cabinet might look like, there’s not exactly a plethora of talent in RN so she’d probably have to reach out to Zemmour & LR types, but would she even want them if they don’t back her in R2?

https://www.ft.com/content/1d2bb0f0-a219-42e7-9ba9-634bdd11c396

Marine Le Pen open to appointing leftists if she wins French presidency

Far-right politician Marine Le Pen has said she is open to appointing leftwingers in her government if she is elected French president later this month.

Le Pen, who has already held out the prospect of a “government of national unity”, said on Thursday that while she would “probably not” work with hard-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, she could work with leftists such as those who follow Jean-Pierre Chevènement, a former interior minister under Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin.

Whether you believe it, is up to you.

I did see that, Chevenement himself is past 80 though and it’s not like there’s a huge number of adherents he has left.

[Coldstream]

Let's keep in mind that in still (IMHO) unlikely event that Lepen were to win the run-off, its very questionable whether she would get the usual win for her party in the legislative elections. In fact we could have a situation where she could be president and her party might still have very little representation in the assembly meaning there would have to be "co-habitation" with a PM and government entirely made up of people from other parties...

French posters will correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that the President can still name a PM/government even without a legislative majority. Last time Philippe became PM the day after Macron took office, a full month before the legislative elections when they were without a majority. So Le Pen could appoint a government for a few weeks at least.

[Coldstream]

I’d vote: Hidalgo, Jadot, Roussel/Macron (unsure in what order between these two, both are bad but better than the alternatives). I’d vote Hidalgo because I thinks she’s the best even though is essentially virtue signalling at this point.

Prediction:

Macron 26%
Le Pen 22%
Melenchon 16%
Zemmour 10%
Pecresse 8%
Jadot 5%
Roussel 3%
Hidalgo 2%
Lassalle 2%
Dupont-Aignan 2%
Arthaud 1%
Poutou 0.5%

[Coldstream]

If there was a left candidate that wasn’t Melenchon, they’d have beaten Le Pen and be in the run off. Which they’d likely lose, but still. Though of course this is only due to Zemmour, rather than the strength of the left

[Coldstream]

If there was a left candidate that wasn’t Melenchon, they’d have beaten Le Pen and be in the run off. Which they’d likely lose, but still.

There were several left candidates who were not Melenchon they just didn’t get many votes

One from a disgraced party (fairly or unfairly, the PS are done) and 3 unknown Communists.

[Coldstream]

Since nobody has talked about him yet, why is Lasalle overperforming? I thought he would only get 1% and yet he is at 3%

Lassalle is a great repository for NOTA votes since he can’t win & his policies are pretty moderate compared to the other candidates.

[Coldstream]

Legislatives are going to be really interesting: will PS and LR incumbents follow their candidates into political graves?

I feel like if they make it in to the run off against a RN or LFI candidate they’ll probably be okay, the question is whether they can get enough to do that.

[Coldstream]

I wonder if people like Ciotti will bite the bullet this time and endorse Le Pen rather than be silent. LR are finished so they’ve nothing really to lose.

[Coldstream]

Best result map I have found:

https://www.france24.com/en/live-2022-french-presidential-election-%E2%80%93-first-round-results

Lassale is doing really well in the Pyrenees border with Spain.

It’s where he represents + Bayrou did well there in 2012. I guess they must like centrist outsiders.

[Coldstream]

Has Le Pen spoken yet?

[Coldstream]

Macron seems considerably less triumphalist than I expected/he was in 2017. Hopefully that leads to a more collegiate second term should he win one.

[Coldstream]

Given that the difference between Melenchon & Le Pen is greater than Roussel’s total, Melenchon’s ostracising the Communist Party seems increasingly moronic. I do not understand why people think Melenchon is a good campaigner, had be been a bit less sectarian and aggressive he’d have beaten Le Pen.

[Coldstream]

Yeah it’s certainly frustrating about Melenchon but as others have said the fact that the numbers for the ‘alternative’ left were so low shows that many of those who didn’t vote for Melenchon very much did so for a reason.

Of course an alternative candidate of the left would have struggled because they would have had Melenchon eating into their vote!

Hopefully it helps to set minds ahead of 2027….

The point about Melenchon is that even if he had made the second round he’d have lost, not because of his economic policies but because of how awful everything else about him is. Personally I think Le Pen would have beaten him, but that’s debatable.

However the spread shows that there is potential for a broad-left candidate to get through in 2027 without the baggage of Melenchon or the PS.

[Coldstream]

Another thing to note is that the top 4 candidates were all essentially personality based parties (3/4 were founded by their leaders) so the French party system seems to be more or less dead. The parties that had some kind of meaningful internal democracy to choose their candidates finished 5th, 6th & 10th.

[Coldstream]

So, this is maybe a too-specific question, but what the hell happened in Paris's 1st arrondissement? The raw number of votes cast surged (from 9,026 in 2017 to 18,866 this time around), even as on paper turnout declined rather more than in most places, and the character of the constituency changed totally (in 2017 Macron outpaced Fillon 39-31, with Melenchon back at 13% and no one else in double-digits; this time it swung enormously left even by the standards of urban France, with Melenchon outpacing Macron 35-30. Also, LePen surged from 5% in 2017 to 14% this time around, making it her best arrondissement in Paris and by kind of a lot).

I don't think it's an error -- it's not that one candidate has an anomalously high number of votes, they all do -- but it seems like votes from somewhere else were probably added to it somehow?

The 1st arrondissement of Paris is where is located the seat of the ministry of justice and where is centralized part of the results coming from prison inmates all over France (the ones who haven't been deprived of their civic rights). Since 2019, jailed persons can vote in the prison itself instead of requiring a proxy vote form.

Strange patterns for this very bourgeois arrondissement was already noticed for the 2019 European elections when prison inmates constituted then roughly a third of registered voters in the 1st arrondissement: it was the RN’s best arrondissement (with 13.6% against 7.2% in the whole city) as well as LFI’s best arrondissement (with 9.6% above the popular XIX and XX arrondissements).

According to Le Parisien, results for inmates voters were then: RN 23.6%, LFI 19.7%, LREM 9.0% and EELV 8.9% while results for actual residents of the 1st arrondissement were LREM 40.6%, EELV 17.6, LR 10.2%, RN 7.3%, LFI 3.1% (note that the article isn’t giving the complete results for all lists).

There’s a certain irony to the fact criminals & police are most likely to vote for the far right.

[Coldstream]

Sarkozy has officially endorsed Macron in the runoff. There are some hints, he is contemplating a formal government coalition between LREM and the part of LR that will follow him.

https://twitter.com/NicolasSarkozy/status/1513788437387644929

The former president has previously refused to endorse anyone in the election, including the official candidate of the party he has (re)founded (and is now busy destroying), Valérie Pécresse. In one of the last meetings of this latter, the name of Sarkozy was booed by LR attendants when mentioned by Yann Wehrling (once the national secretary of the Greens and now apparently in LR after a stint as general secretary of the Modem; is that me of French politics are looking more and more to Latin American politics?).

So far, most of the LR bigwigs have however expressed their intention to vote for Macron in the runoff but without entering in a formal coalition with him. Other LR members on the Sarkozy line are Jean-François Copé, Philippe Juvin, Guillaume Larrivé (deputy from Yonne) and Jean-Luc Moudenc (mayor of Toulouse).

Only Éric Ciotti, Sylvie Goy-Chavent (senator from Ain) and Julien Aubert (RN-lite deputy from Vaucluse) have so far publicly indicated they will not vote for Macron without indicating which ballot they will cast (Ciotti and Goy-Chavent) or cast a blank vote (Aubert). My guess is that they would have been way more comfortable rallying the Zemmour candidacy in the runoff and that they are awaiting the runoff results before burning the ships.

In case of a reelection of Macron, the Sarko-Macronist putative party would have to coexist inside the presidential majority with LREM, the Modem, Édouard Philippe’s Horizons, Agir (constituted by a first wave of LR dissidents; its fusion with Horizons in last January has been vetoed by Macron himself), Territoires de progrès (the totally useless left wing of Macronism constituted by former PS members), En commun (fake ecologists), the more than a century-old Radical Party and two newcomers: the Progressive Federation (constituted by the latest wave of PS sell-outs) and Republican Refoundation, the party Jean-Pierre Chevènement is trying to set up (providing the project of a ‘left-wing sovereignism for pro-EU Thatcherism’ attract enough followers). The plan seems to consolidate Macronism as the sole viable governing political organization in face of the 'extremist', 'populist' and 'unreasonable' options incarnated by Mélenchon and Le Pen/Zemmour.

I always thought Macron despised Sarkozy, seeing him as a grandstander rather than someone interested in getting things done. Interesting to see how they’d work together if this comes to pass.

Also interesting to see how the candidacies for the 2027 election are decided, will there be a grand “primary of the centre” between representatives from REM, moDem, Phillippe etc? Or will they all fall out and go their separate ways next time, potentially allowing a left wing candidate in to the run off.

[Coldstream]

Haven't really been paying attention, but why is Macron trading at 90+% in betting markets?  Like, obviously he's got a lead, but I thought it was high single digits?

To clarify, betting markets predict the winner not the margin. Ie there’s a 90% chance macron gets at least 1 vote more than Le Pen, not a chance he gets 90% of the vote.

Or, if you ran this election 10 times, Macron would win 9, Le Pen would win 1. This is the point people missed with the NYT prediction in 2016: 90% chance of X means a 1 in 10 chance of Y if those are the two options.

[Coldstream]

I mean, given peoples TV watching patterns, it was only down 2M viewers from 10 years ago. That's not bad at all.

Agreed, an audience share chart would be more useful.

[Coldstream]

Already excited to see Edoard Phillippe beat Marine Le Pen 55-45 in the 2027 run off.

[Coldstream]

What do you guys think a Melenchon vs Le Pen runoff would have looked like?

Le Pen wins narrowly on even lower turnout. People talk about how Macron had no appeal to Melenchon supporters so they stayed home, the reverse is even more true about Melenchon to Macron supporters - and he would make even less of an effort to win them over than Macron has.