France 2017: Results Thread

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Is there an idea of how certain minority groups voted? French Muslims, French Jews, French Black people, etc?

Jews - usually a strong constituency for the right. They probably voted for Fillon in big numbers. The FN were doing well with Jews, although Le Pen probably lost support over the Vel d'Hiv comments. Macron probably lost support with Jews, who are largely of North African/pied noir descent, with his comments on Algeria being a "war crime", and the left are probably perceived as being too close to Muslims.

Muslims and blacks - overwhelmingly for Mélenchon and Macron (basically see the results in Seine-Saint-Denis, and places like Vénissieux in the Rhône to get an idea.

Note that, in France, collecting data on ethnicity is illegal, so reliable figures are very hard to come by.

No one can collect it at all?

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Just glancing at maps of the French results, as someone with limited knowledge of French politics, but with a fascination with political geography:

I see that Macron performed very well in western France.  Traditionally, this was a conservative Catholic region.  I gather that its politics has become less distinctive in recent years.    So what would explain such strong support for Macron?  A relatively prosperous economy?  A Christian Democratic Europhilia?  The support of Bayrou?  Or of Fillon?  Am I right to see a pattern of Le Pen not performing terribly well in historically Catholic regions?

Otherwise, the patterns make sense to me.  Le Pen was only really strong in the northern rust belt, and the traditional extreme-right strongholds on the Mediterranean coast (resentment of immigrants, ancestral pied-noir anger, high unemployment).  But she also did well in northeastern departments such as Haute-Marne and Meuse.  Nationalist sentiment in a part of France that suffered greatly in the two world wars?  A traditionally right-wing region?  Or just economically depressed rural areas?  And there seems to be a bit of a Le Pen belt about 80 km north and west of Paris -- she did relatively well in the departments of Eure and Oise.  White-flight exurbs?  

Like Hillary Clinton or "Remain," Macron was very strong in the largest cities.  Not just Paris, but also Lyon, Bordeaux, and Toulouse.  Lille and the cities of the far south were exceptions, but not surprising ones.  He also seemed to be relatively strong in some parts of the rural southwest -- the political tradition there is left-wing, non?  

Definitely a lot of Fillon/Macron voters in those parts of the West with a strong Catholic tradition.  In the first round practicing Catholics gave a large proportion of their votes to Fillon, but a very small proportion to Le Pen, according to the Ipsos poll.   You may be onto something with the pro-Europe link: Check out Hash's map and blog post on the 2005 EU referendum.  See that area of support running from Vendee north to Normandy?

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[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Paris went 89.7% Macron
Rennes went 88.4% Macron

Do any other big cities give him bigger numbers?

Also, it's quite interesting to compare round one and round two numbers - the correlation between a high left wing vote in the first round and a high second round vote for Le Pen looks surprisingly weak. In particular round the South West.

What sort of correlation were you expecting?

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

11.47% of votes cast were Blank and null ballots.  I assume most of them were  Mélenchon voters.

Probably reasonably close to a majority of those were Melenchon voters, though a fair number were probably Fillon voters as well, with some Hamon and DuPont-Aignan voters and of course a large portion of the people who voted for fringe candidates in the first round. Plus 2.57% cast blank or null ballots in the first round already.

This is from polling results of those who supported the top 5 candidates in the first round: