French presidential election, 2022

[Antonio the Sixth]

So is this mostly the north of France outside of Paris where the votes have been counted?

Mostly rural France nationwide.

On that point, two more southern departments are joining Lozère:

Alpes-de-Haute-Provence: 51.45% Le Pen, 48.55% Macron. 67% voted for a candidate, and did not abstain or vote blanc.
Cantal: 56.1% Macron, 43.9% Le Pen. 69.43% voted for a candidate.

We're seeing Macron around 13-14 points below his 2017 result throughout the mostly rural and Southern departments that have fully reported so far. So either the projections are significantly off (unlikely) or, more likely, he's lost more ground than average in those places compared to more urban areas. In other words, the cleavage between metropolitan and peripheral France has gotten even deeper.

I guess I should be happy to have another data point for my postdoctoral research, but I'd like nothing more than to see it proven wrong.

Lasalle voters being funnelled towards Le Pen perhaps? From the couple of northern departments that have reported I see that the swings to Le Pen are much more in line with the exit poll’s projection (7-8 points), even in Le Pen friendly territory like Meuse.

Looking at those results now and yeah, it looks like Eure-et-Loir as well as those reporting departments around Champagne and Lorraine are showing swings of 7-8 points. Interesting. I think the most likely explanation then is that a lot of traditional left-wing rural voters who gave Macron a chance last time (when he was the de-facto center-left candidate) went over to the #populist side. And given the first-round swings, it seems many of them did so by the first round, even. If so, that's actually even sadder. Oh well.

[Antonio the Sixth]

So is this mostly the north of France outside of Paris where the votes have been counted?

Mostly rural France nationwide.

On that point, two more southern departments are joining Lozère:

Alpes-de-Haute-Provence: 51.45% Le Pen, 48.55% Macron. 67% voted for a candidate, and did not abstain or vote blanc.
Cantal: 56.1% Macron, 43.9% Le Pen. 69.43% voted for a candidate.

We're seeing Macron around 13-14 points below his 2017 result throughout the mostly rural and Southern departments that have fully reported so far. So either the projections are significantly off (unlikely) or, more likely, he's lost more ground than average in those places compared to more urban areas. In other words, the cleavage between metropolitan and peripheral France has gotten even deeper.

I guess I should be happy to have another data point for my postdoctoral research, but I'd like nothing more than to see it proven wrong.

So far.in Ile de France it seems to be more like 5-6%.

The IdF results aren't representative yet: even within those departments, it's the relatively less urbanized areas that report first. So if anything Macron might end up even higher there. But we'll see.

[Antonio the Sixth]

With 85% of votes counted, Macron finally crosses 55%. The remaining 15% is strongly concentrated in IdF and other big metropoles, so he can definitely net a few more points there, but we'll have to see if he gets to his projected score.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Why is Brittany such a stronghold for Macron?

The old Catholic regions like Brittany (but also nearby regions in the broader Grand Ouest) morphed into a center-left political leaning around the turn of the century. For this areas, "openness" and aversion to extremism are pretty important elements of their identity, and they were really activated in the past few years.

[Antonio the Sixth]

90% counted, Macron at 56.5%. To get to the projections, he'd have to win what's left with 70-75%. Which seems fairly plausible actually.

[Antonio the Sixth]

90% counted, Macron at 56.5%. To get to the projections, he'd have to win what's left with 70-75%. Which seems fairly plausible actually.

Yeah, he's currently at 57.4% with not a lot in yet from Marseille and with some of Paris yet to be reported. Plus, a lot of overseas votes are still being counted and Macron is winning by a 85-15% margin.

Paris finished counting and Macron is up to 58.3%. Looks like all that's left is Marseille and the expat vote.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Looks like the expat votes finished reporting, so these should be the final results:

Macron 38.52% (-5.09 from 2017)
Le Pen 27.28% (+4.92)

Blank 4.57% (-1.78)
Invalid 1.62% (-0.62)
Abstentions 28.01% (+2.57)

Edit: Mike beat me to it so I showed % of registered voters.

[Antonio the Sixth]

LOL Glenn Greenwald is getting pissy.

Please show the tweets. I'm in the mood for some good old-fashioned dunking.

[Antonio the Sixth]

If Macron is defined as “rightwing” what was Francois Hollande? He was supposedly a socialist but wasn’t his presidency all about austerity and Macron was his Economics Minister?

Under Hollande there was some real measure of downwards redistribution, even if that was muddled up by some boondoggle schemes of subsidies to businesses and an absurd effort to deregulate worker protections.

Macron meanwhile abolished the wealth tax and slashed the capital gains tax, in addition to further labor deregulations and the continued undermining of the pensions system.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Vélizy does stand out as noticeably more middle-class than its very upscale surroundings. I guess that matches my experience there, though it's still hard not to think of it as part of the wealthy Greater Western Paris.

[Antonio the Sixth]

To be fair, the Constitutional Council's policy of throwing out all the votes in a polling station if anything remotely sketchy happens in it is absurd and potentially ripe for abuse. I know France is a somewhat more civilized country than the US for now, but what if there was a close local election and a bunch of RN activists deliberately went and sabotaged the elections in the places where they knew their opponent was strong?

[Antonio the Sixth]

I guess we've moved on, but I made a map of the evolution of the left vote on the first round from 2017 to 2022:



Top left: Mélenchon 2017 -> Mélenchon+Roussel 2022
Bottom left: Hamon 2017 -> Jadot+Hidalgo 2022
Right: Total Left 2017 -> Total Left 2022 (including the Trotskyist candidates, which I didn't bother mapping directly)

Some interesting patterns here. The Mélenchon+Roussel map isn't too different from the Mélenchon map I already made, except with a higher baseline. Thankfully that means their combined total grew almost everywhere, but the bulk of that growth remains concentrated in IdF, the DTOMs, and Rhône-Alpes. Even combined, they still manage to underperform or just barely tie Mélenchon's 2017 in some parts of the Pyrenees and in much of the postindustrial Northeast (Pas-de-Calais being the worst underperformance of all, with Mélenchon+Roussel over 0.8 points under Mélenchon's 2017 result. Overall, a map that shows further concentration of the left-wing vote in France's metropoles.

Unlike with Mélenchon and Roussel, Hidalgo and Jadot managed to somehow underperform Hamon's total in 2017 as a percentage of registered voters, winning a combined 4.6% against Hamon's 4.82%. This is illustrated by the map showing them losing ground around large swathes of France. Unlike Mélenchon, they don't have Ile-de-France or the DTOMs to bring them up - in fact, their underperformance is even worse in those areas (-0.88 and -1.74, respectively). They also lost significantly in old left-wing strongholds like Pas-de-Calais and Ardennes in the North, much of the Pyrenees in the South, and Nièvre and Limousin in the center, as well as in Finistère which I think was Hamon's home turf. On the other hand, their overperformance was even more notable than Mélenchon in almost all of France's East, stretching all the way from Bas-Rhin to Alpes-Maritimes (and, a personal satisfaction for me, with an epicenter right around the Savoies). This broad swatch traditionally included some of the weakest areas for the French left, but at least some parts of it appear to be increasingly amenable to it. A lot of it has to do with trendy emerging metropoles there (Lyon, Grenoble, Strasbourg, even perhaps Nice) but that can't be all there is to it. Also, Pays de la Loire sticks out really weirdly in that map too, which is weird given that it's one of the regions with the least distinct identity.

The Total Left map is largely a superposition of the first two, as the trots had little meaningful trend. Generally speaking, the left improved everywhere, but by far disproportionally so in IdF, the DTOMs, and Rhône-Alpes, and to a lesser extent also Alsace, PACA and Franche-Comté. In less friendly areas, the most "metropolitan" departments still stand out from their surroundings as areas where the left gained most (Haute-Garonne again in particular). Meanwhile, the Pyrenees area once again stands out as an area of particular decline for the left (probably in large part a product of Lassalle's gains, although I suspect there's more to it than that). There also seems to be a particular weakness to the North of the Massif Central. This stretch around Creuse, Allier, Nièvre, Cher and Indre is a historical patch of left-wing strength (whether communist like in Allier or socialist like in Nièvre), representing the old tip of the old C-shaped arc of left-wing strength to the South. It's also one of the most rural parts of France, smack into the middle of the "Empty Diagonal", so the left's decline here can definitely be seen as part of Muh Trends. Finally, we can also see a decline of the left, once again, in its old Northern strongholds, once again Pas-de-Calais but also Seine-Maritime and Ardennes. The left did improve slightly in Nord, but I'm willing to bet that's mostly because of Lille.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Last map because even I'm getting bored of this, but I've been working on this one for a while (before I got distracted by the legislative playing field taking shape. Here's a map comparing last month's runoff results to 2017's - Macron, Le Pen, and assorted non-votes.



Macron lost ground everywhere, and Le Pen gained ground everywhere except in New Caledonia, where turnout just plummeted across the board. The overall pattern is something we've seen already in previous map, but it bears repeating: the swing was most significant around the Massif Central and the Pyrenees, overlapping somewhat (but far from perfectly) with the traditional area of left-wing strength in the Southwest. The DTOMs also stands out as big Le Pen gains, as do to a lesser extent Brittany and the rural Alpine parts of PACA. By contrast, the swing was more muted in a lot of the North and East, places where Le Pen had already done very well in 2017 (but also Rhône, which was already an FBM stronghold and now stands out even more). Ile-de-France appears to have seen significant Macron losses, but little Le Pen gains, which leads us straight to the third map.

Probably the most interesting of the three, the map shows which places voted less (red) or more (green) than they did in 2017. Going in, it was really hard to say which way it would go: on the one hand, the closer race should motivate more people to turn out; on the other hand, Macron being the incumbent and having fallen short of the (already very low) expectations of left-wing voters meant that some of the people who voted holding their noses in 2017 might not bother this time. In the end, it seems like these two effects canceled each other out: the share of valid votes cast as % of registered voters dropped by just 0.22 points (interestingly, the share of blank and spoiled votes went down while abstention went up). That movement was not uniform across the map, however. Once again, IdF stands out as an area where significantly fewer people bothered to vote this time (and within IdF, the 93 in particular, a surefire tell of Mélenchonist rejection for Macron). Turnout in the big DTOMs also dropped massively, signaling that Le Pen's landslides there aren't quite as impressive as they look (although it went up in Mayotte, indicating some genuine groundswell of support there). Aside from those, the areas that turned out left are mostly found in that old Pyrénées-Massif Central region, although even there the drops are usually fairly small. In most of non-IdF metropolitan France, there was actually quite a bit of mobilization compared to 2017, especially in the Northeastern belt that makes up Le Pen's old stronghold (but also in some big-city areas like Haute-Garonne). The uptick in the non-IdF North might have something to do with school vacation pattersn, as Gaël's map a while ago showed. However, the trend is far more generalized across France to be reduced to that. A lot of people did seem to feel the need to get involved this time even if they'd skipped 2017.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Way late to the party, but I've been working on this map for ages and it's finally done:



This uses the same "ideological blocs" that I used in previous maps (though I've also decided to fill in the blanks by giving 50% of the Lassalle vote to the left and 25% to each of the two rights, as that happens to produce an almost perfect 33-33-33 split). Left is red, liberal right is green, sovereignist right is blue, and the various combinations of colors reflect the split of this three blocs in any given constituency. For example, a yellow-ish constituency would have about an even split of left and liberal, but few nationalist votes. White constituencies are almost perfect national bellwethers.

Basically, I've always wanted to make a map using this kind of "triangular" color scheme and realized this was the golden opportunity. I hope the result was worth it!