French presidential election, 2022

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Zemmour is absolutely an antisemite, and clearly some people should revise their assumptions about many Israelis (or at least French Israelis, in this case) as well.

There are approximately 200,000 French Israelis and of these close to 100,000 (it may actually be over that now, given everything) were born in France. We don't seem to have full figures for this year yet, but five years ago the total number of votes cast in Israel in the first round was 8,280. If we include the votes cast in the occupied territories to this (presumably they are largely cast by people in the settlements) then we reach a figure of 11,398. The figure might well be higher this time, but it's still going to be comparatively low. The point being that while ex-pat electoral statistics can be interesting they tell us rather more about the minority of ex-pats motivated enough to go through the messy process of casting a vote in an election back 'home' than about the entire ex-pat community.

Which isn't to say that this isn't an instructive example of the things people can overlook when there are other motivating factors, although, on that front, it isn't even the only example from this election.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Anyway, on those demographic estimates, it is amusing to note a higher than average percentage amongst young voters for Roussel, which really does prove that he was a meme candidate. More seriously, Le Pen polling about the same with both of the firmly 'working class' occupational categories rather merely overperforming massively with the largely male one is the culmination of something that has been building for a while and is pretty gloomily significant.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

An interesting observation someone made elsewhere yesterday was that there's something of Mitterrand to Melenchon and it works very well, doesn't it? A charismatic figure thriving as the old parties of the Left flail about and collapse; an ego the size of Saturn and a cultish fanbase to match; a clear ability to know which buttons work to consolidate Left voters who don't even like them much... and a definite sense that amidst all that red there's a whiff, a distinct whiff, of something brown as well. It is particularly apt because, as a young man, Melenchon was quite the Mitterrand fanboy.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I suspect that one explanation of the strength of Zemmour's performance in affluent parts of Paris, which goes above and beyond what we would have expected, is that French Jews voted en masse for him. Will they vote for Le Pen against Macron? No, of course not, they are self-respecting people but they would vote for a disgusting fascist bigot who is one of their own - events have radicalized them...

I would be careful with that - the correlation between 'rich urban district' and 'substantial Jewish population' is very much not absolute in France, and the Jewish populations in the most affluent urban districts will tend to be of Alsatian rather than North African descent, which is an important distinction to be aware of. Different histories,* different political inclinations, different social concerns would all add up to different levels of receptiveness to a candidate like Zemmour. Essentially there is no reason to believe that there's an ethnic dimension to Zemmour's strikingly high support in those districts.

But when you look at suburbs known for having substantial Sephardic populations (not generally all that affluent it has to be pointed out), there are often elevated Zemmour percentages (though not elevated enough for overwhelming to be plausible: just more likely than average) and I think the psychology there is much as you describe. And of course he made an effort to target those voters, who can hardly easily vote for either of the other protest options: we can here make a parallel with voters of Muslim ethnicities who opted for Melenchon despite a record of crassly bigoted statements ('raghead' and so on) because all of the other options were even more tainted and because he made the effort to chase for their votes.

_{*Strange and disturbing remarks about the Dreyfus Affair would, one would assume, land much harder with the smaller, older group for certain obvious reasons.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Christ's sake take it outside the pair of you.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Huh, wow. That really was a different world back then.

Yes and also no: it was genuinely shocking at the time.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Mainly being a politician since the 80's and buying a cheap apartment in Paris in that era (and selling it in the last decade).

And while I'm certainly not alleging any impropriety here, Mitterrand allies in particular tended to have a good 1980s/early 90s from a financial perspective.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A request: I'm going to do some maps of the results at arrondissement and municipal level for the City of Paris and the Petite Couronne and happen to have a strongly principled objection to decision of authorities to include prisoner ballots in with the results from the 1st arrondissement - psephological vandalism in my view. Does anyone have the results for that arrondissement without the numbers from the prisoner polling district?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Diolch to both of you!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Her father ran five times and it would have been six had he managed to qualify for the ballot in 1981.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yeah, that's the thing: those of us of a certain age and older will remember the landscape twenty years ago, with the 'Plural Left' and two allied-but-competing conservative parties (one of which was itself technically an alliance of smaller parties). In general I tend to think that arguing about who should 'lead' the Left comes across as bald men arguing furiously over the ownership of a comb: right now the French Left is not in any position to actually win an election, and it would make more sense to consider how it might be able to rebuild its image with certain parts of the electorate* and how it might break out of its electoral ghetto than on fighting over which party has the right to nominate the standard-bearer who will either get narrowly eliminated in Round One or crushed in Round Two.

_{*And the reality of the French electoral system means that this also includes people who would never vote for it in the first round of any election.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Aren't the overseas results a little scary? I know they are not the same as the mainland but they were the first piece of information that foreshadowed Mélenchon overperforming his polling two weeks ago.

Well they're certainly good for Le Pen. But these things can be hard to read and might tell an entirely different story: Macron's first round results in the colonial territories two weeks ago were dire - including some sharp falls on last time round in several - and he's clearly deeply unpopular in many of them.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

LR and PS are in meltdown, which may leave dozens of seats on the table for LREM, and no one has ever managed to make the losers' revenge thing work in the legislatives on the scale needed to deprive Macron of a majority under these conditions. Le Pen's core demographic is also not famous for flocking to the polls at low-turnout elections. Can we at least try not to get distracted by fantasies and shiny one-off poll results? The odds are on LREM's side here.

Crucial thing to remember here is that LR-UDI still won 130 seats last time and they're in absolute pieces now, as broken as the PS. That alone opens up a lot of room for EN MARCHE to carry on marching forwards, even if they lose ground elsewhere.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I think we can say fairly clearly that Macron has governed the country like a Giscard - or even a Chirac actually - and that his electoral coalition this time round reflected that, but also that his political journey has been an odd one and that elements of this can also be found in his electoral coalition: it is this combination that makes him a politically dominant figure, for all his general lack of concrete accomplishment.* So thinking of him as functionally a political figure of the Right makes sense, so long as we accept that this doesn't make him a glow-up version of Poison Dwarf: and I think not quite getting this is where some of his left-wing critics fall down. His personal political views are, of course, entirely obscure, but that's hardly a novelty amongst French Presidents or even that relevant: none of us will ever know exactly what Mitterrand believed in, if he ever believed in anything other than Mitterrand. It makes sense to accept that this is also true of Macron.

_{*Having a broadly right-wing electorate but with strong elements from elsewhere who might not so easily vote for a candidate with a similar policy profile also makes him, in this singular respect at least, more like De Gaulle than any other post-De Gaulle President of the Fifth Republic: whether this is appropriate or ironic is best viewed as a matter of personal preference.}