French presidential election, 2022

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/tuxfak/status/1516219753550938116?s=20&t=RxCjvKy-q3mckEe...

Excellent map thread. All images come from it and all credit should go to @tuxfak.

[Oryxslayer]

[Oryxslayer]

[Vosem]

Now Euro elections do cause weird results given the people turning out differ and are usually lower than in national elections, but in a country as centralized as France I don’t think local elections have the same weight to them. EU elections, I am assuming with good reason, that many with support for melenchon do not even turn out for hatred and displeasure of the EU.

That Melenchon’s “base”, about 15-17% of the electorate, is larger than the rest of the French Left combined and is more “loyal” ratio wise then any other candidate speaks to how efficiently organized they actually are.

Melenchon's base is much smaller than this -- for almost the entire campaign period he polled at a very consistent 9-11%, and it was only during his surge that he crossed 15% at all, a number he never crossed, in any poll for this election, until March 2022. And even that probably overstates things because French polls throw out undecideds; Melenchon's "base" is in the single digits.

It of course says something profound about the rest of the French left that they could not manage to get ahead of him, of course.

The French EELV, quite frankly, cannot see any more room to grow with the existence of Macron. There is both not enough of well-off bohemians in France to grow in power relative to countries like Germany or Austria and a relative failure in integrating the immigrant elites to grow, which is less on Macron. I suspect the few lefty holdouts that bring us people like Sandrine to exit shortly and head for better pastures, like Macron for the most part.

The LFI is here to stay, and given where they are in power or have leverage they don’t currently act like PS/Mitterrand 2.0 for the sake of continuing on in gaining power, they are the dominant faction—end of story.

They can't be a dominant faction if they're not the dominant left-wing faction in the National Assembly or the European Parliament or even any regional parliament (with the exceptions of Guyana and Reunion, which are both not in metropolitan France). And they tried, they ran candidates in all of these elections.

I'm not even necessarily disagreeing with you; I would be surprised if LFI does not emerge as the strongest left-wing option at the legislative elections in a few months. But they're certainly not the dominant faction at the moment.

[NewYorkExpress]

Marine Le Pen and National Rally are under investigation by the European Union for embezzlement of funds while she was an MEP.

Paris prosecutors are studying a report by the European Union’s fraud agency accusing French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen and other members of her nationalist party of misusing public funds while serving in the European Parliament.

The report was disclosed by French investigative news site Mediapart just days before Le Pen faces incumbent Emmanuel Macron in a runoff election Sunday that could determine Europe’s future direction. Le Pen’s party National Rally seeks to diminish the EU’s powers.

[Zinneke]

Detailed support patterns for each candidate. Can someone explain Le Pen's strength in northern Gironde?
https://www.lefigaro.fr/elections/presidentielles/presidentielle-2022-decouvrez-la-physionomie-du-vote-par-commune-20220410

It doesn't look like anyone else has touched this yet, so I will. The Garonne river carves a diagonal through the hilly/mountainy southwest of France, creating a valley of agricultural settlements. There are some large river cities like Bordeaux and Toulouse that served as magnets for the rural population, both in the past and now. It is essentially a miniature version of the bigger 'empty diagonal' to it's east.

Unsurprisingly, the diagonal shows up on political maps.





But why is Le Pen strongest there and weaker, but still strong, further down the valley? I can't give you a clear answer on that, but I will note that the reason for it is the lack of Melenchon. Unlike much of the SW, including the rest of the valley, this part of Gironde lacks the socialist political traditions that gave Melenchon decent results across the south.

I found the answer listening to a podcast this weekend : lots of Pieds-Noirs settled in this valley.

[BlueSwan]

Polling seems to be moving in Macrons direction of late. Nice, but I will not sleep easily until he's got it won.

[parochial boy]

One thing to bear in mind is that the French party self in and of itself is quite different to what you see elsewhere. As in, it is far more dependent on individuals and individual fiefdoms rather than long term partisan attachments. All the more so now after the collapse of the PS-RPR tandem and the PCF who had been historically the best developing these.

(eg the Parti Radical de Gauche always had this stronghold in the South West, then they did a merger and a split and now there are two parties called "radical de gauche", which is probably about as many as the number of people who actually consciously vote for them)

It is really best to think of the French partisan environment as more of a number of ideological constellations that ebb and flow on the basis of which political figures bring what to the table. With ever developing structural relationships and splits and mergers. In that respect, the era of the PS and RPR/UMP being the uncontested leaders of each of their constellations is actually a little bit misleading. All the more so in as far as it really only lasted for a relatively short period of time from, what, the Chirac to the Hollande years.

Basically, what I mean is, I don't think there will be one dominant left wing force that "emerges" in the next years. Left wing electoral success in the European and various local elections over the next five years will rely on who can establish which alliances at which levels for which elections. This has always more or less been how things functions, just in the past the PS were the obvious dominant partner and now it is probably more reliant on the personal appeal of certain individuals and their willingness to compromise. EELV have an advantage here in that they do have figures like Éric Piolle with an established local base. but LFI probably aren't far from that in the 93; and well, it all very much remains to be seen. Overall there are some grounds for optimism, even if they are fleeting ones at the moment.

I was under the impression Ruffin had the largest (by far) profile of any LFI figure sans JLM and Manon Aubry?

He probably is - or war - based on things like "Merci Patron". I haven't seen much of him recently though, not really sure why.

Quattennes is pretty cute, so I could be amenable in backing him if he gets the leadership role over Ruffin

What are the general profiles of him and the other contenders aside from Ruffin?

Quatennens is probably the closest to the Mélenchon line, an early member of the Parti de Gauche (which still exists actually, in some ways as the political and organisational motor behind LFI) and is good at pulling the populst cords. He is probably the best able to play the role of "tribun", I'm not really sure how you'd translate that to English - but something like someone who is able to speak well and emotionally, in the Méluche style.

Obono and Autain are both technically members of "Ensemble!" which is another annex party of LFI that was basically set up in collaboration between former members of the NPA/LCR and the Young Greens who had split from the main party in the 1980s or 90s, I forget when exactly. In that respect, they are closer to a more explicitely anti-authoritarian left, and more engaged in New Left style societal causes. Both have an uncanny ability to get racists and reactionaries frothing at the mouth. Obono for instance had the delightful experience of a right wing magazine fantasising about her being sold into slavery recently, which was nice.

Your decision as to whether that is a strong point or not, but both are well received by the online left - have their political bases in the North East of Paris and the 9-3, so no surprises why they get the reactions they do.

Aurélie Trouvé is co-president of Attac, which is a campaign group in favour of a financial transactions tax among other things. She is standing in the legislatives, but not sure if she has any particular political ambitions beyond that.

There are probaly others I'm missing, but those seem to be the main ones with an actual existence independent of Méluche himself.

[wbrocks67]

Marine Le Pen and National Rally are under investigation by the European Union for embezzlement of funds while she was an MEP.

Paris prosecutors are studying a report by the European Union’s fraud agency accusing French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen and other members of her nationalist party of misusing public funds while serving in the European Parliament.

The report was disclosed by French investigative news site Mediapart just days before Le Pen faces incumbent Emmanuel Macron in a runoff election Sunday that could determine Europe’s future direction. Le Pen’s party National Rally seeks to diminish the EU’s powers.

interestingly, it seems like Le Pen's momentum stopped the day the first round election was held. now it appears momentum is clearly in Macron's favor

[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.}

[Zinneke]

Roussel may have been a "meme" candidate but he did actually try and send out the right signals to attract that kind of second round voter Al is talking about : he changed his NATO stance stating clearly that NATO withdrawal while Ukraine was under attack was the wrong message to send and that his opposition to NATO was purely a long term structural "fix" to build a peaceful Europe. This is already a signal to many people believing the far left are all Putinist/Chinese assets that they are capable of actual agency in their own decision making and not just tow the Xi Jingping line.

Mélenchon is a very good campaigner and deserves the bald-man-with-comb award, but his campaigning is mostly to finish as the top left candidate, and not actually reach out to segments of the now Macronist or right-wing electorate.

Really though I would not overrated the chances of the Left : all the indicators show that while it is not utterly destroyed as expected, most French voters identify with the political Right and the average French progressive should be pleased a former Socialist Party member is on course for 2 terms because it could have been far, far worse. Our chances could have been taken this Presidential election when the far right vote was split arguably 3 ways, and in a legislative where low turnout from right-wing voters who won't be as motivated. And then maybe a generational shift as the demographics look good, but that's not until a long time given the demographic pyramid.

[DL]

Not that many years ago, the conventional wisdom was that Dominique Strauss-Khan would be the PS candidate for President and would win. had it not been for his sex scandal, he would almost certainly have been elected president in 2012. My question is - from a policy point of view would there have been any difference at all between the policies of a DSK presidency vs the policies of Macron?

[Zinneke]

Not that many years ago, the conventional wisdom was that Dominique Strauss-Khan would be the PS candidate for President and would win. had it not been for his sex scandal, he would almost certainly have been elected president in 2012. My question is - from a policy point of view would there have been any difference at all between the policies of a DSK presidency vs the policies of Macron?

Many of Macron’s entourage are ex-DSK. Maybe you wouldn’t have a light fash like Darmamin at Interior though

Less orgies in the Elysée if you count that as a policy though

[Person Man]

Polling seems to be moving in Macrons direction of late. Nice, but I will not sleep easily until he's got it won.

The only way he loses now is massive fraud.

[Antonio the Sixth]

To get back to the electoral analysis, one thing that struck me, and that made it hard to analyze the results at first (and is the reason why projections were slightly off on election night), is the fact that the swings in Ile-de-France were so different from those in the rest of the country. This is very unusual, as usually while IdF is of course electorally distinctive in some ways (most notably by having a very weak FN), it used to be a swing region for most of the Fifth Republic, and even when it wasn't, its overall swings tended to match those of the rest of Metropolitan France. This time though, that wasn't the case.

Here I've calculated the results for the 11 regions of mainland France other than IdF:
Macron 27.35% (+4.42)
Le Pen 25.47% (+2.25)
Mélenchon 19.86% (+0.63)
Zemmour 7.03%
Pécresse 4.53% (-14.88)
Jadot 4.50%
Lassalle 3.49%
Roussel 2.43%
Dupont-Aignan 2.16%
Hidalgo 1.81%
Poutou 0.80%
Arthaud 0.59%

And here's the Ile-de-France results:
Macron 30.19% (+1.56)
Le Pen 12.97% (+0.40)
Mélenchon 30.24% (+8.49)
Zemmour 7.47%
Pécresse 6.19% (-16.00)
Jadot 5.40%
Lassalle 1.59%
Roussel 1.92%
Dupont-Aignan 1.59%
Hidalgo 1.43%
Poutou 0.60%
Arthaud 0.40%

In IdF, the momentum was almost entirely concentrated around Mélenchon, who amazingly managed to come first in France's most populous region. This wasn't even just a product of tactical voting, either: even the non-Mélenchon left candidates managed to add 0.88 points to their overall scores from 2017. While Macron gained a point or two, his electorate was massively shifted to the right, eating up most of Fillon's voters. Le Pen also barely improved from her already low 2017 score. In the rest of mainland France, meanwhile, the roles are reversed: Mélenchon gained just half a point (less than non-Mélenchon left candidates, who collectively gained 2.24), while Macron and Le Pen gained significantly more. So outside of IdF, the gap between Mélenchon and Le Pen actually grew (from 4 points to 5.62). Le Pen actually won the non-IdF mainland vote in 2017, edging out Macron by 0.3. Macron's larger gains outside IdF allowed him to pull ahead this time, and seems to indicate that he bled far less support to the left overall. It's going to be interesting to see the long-term implications of this process.

Finally, let's not forget about the third big bucket of votes that propped Mélenchon up significantly: the DTOMs. While their electoral impact is limited by low turnout (only 43.22% valid turnout in 2017 and 42.09% in 2022) they nevertheless provided massive swings toward Mélenchon that helped him come so close to Le Pen.

Macron 20.56% (+0.15)
Le Pen 21.30% (-0.60)
Mélenchon 39.99% (+19.22)
Zemmour 4.06%
Pécresse 4.00% (-16.73)
Jadot 2.17%
Lassalle 1.21%
Roussel 0.71%
Dupont-Aignan 2.43%
Hidalgo 1.79%
Poutou 0.77%
Arthaud 1.01%

The 2017 result in DTOMs was an almost 4-way with each candidate within 1.5 point of each other (and Le Pen, of all candidates, hilariously ahead). This time however, Mélenchon really swept through, nearly doubling his score and distancing any competition. Hilariously, if you looked at these results with no context, you might assume he siphoned off mostly 2017 Fillon voters, but of course the reality probably involves some major communicating-vases effect, along with general DTOM randomness. Either way, that helped pad Mélenchon's result and, if he'd done a bit better elsewhere, could have been the key factor bringing him to the second round.

I already posted the full expat results earlier in the thread. All that's left is Corsica, which can easily be found online and which amounts to less than 150k votes, so I won't bother posting the results here.

[vileplume]

Has anyone noted the hilarious irony that Macron is a native of Amiens in the depressed postindustrial north of France, while Le Pen had grown up and currently lives in the posh western suburbs of Paris, in particular Neuilly, Saint-Cloud, and La Celle-Saint-Cloud, basically some of the wealthiest towns in the country. And her father is from Brittany, a region which showed her very little love!

I wonder how these very rich areas would vote in a hypothetical Le Pen vs. Mélenchon Round 2 as these areas obviously can't stand either of them? I imagine they'd hold their noses and vote en masse for Le Pen as her brand of far-rightism is less probably far less threatening to the bourgeoisie types of Neuilly-sur-Seine than Mélenchon's brand of far-leftism. They'd definitely still vote in a landslide against the RN in the legislative elections though.

[Oryxslayer]

Has anyone noted the hilarious irony that Macron is a native of Amiens in the depressed postindustrial north of France, while Le Pen had grown up and currently lives in the posh western suburbs of Paris, in particular Neuilly, Saint-Cloud, and La Celle-Saint-Cloud, basically some of the wealthiest towns in the country. And her father is from Brittany, a region which showed her very little love!

I wonder how these very rich areas would vote in a hypothetical Le Pen vs. Mélenchon Round 2 as these areas obviously can't stand either of them? I imagine they'd hold their noses and vote en masse for Le Pen as her brand of far-rightism is less probably far less threatening to the bourgeoisie types of Neuilly-sur-Seine than Mélenchon's brand of far-leftism. They'd definitely still vote in a landslide against the RN in the legislative elections though.

Another good map that @tuxfak did yesterday. Obviously this is not a full vote, but a comparison of 20-ish percentages, but it is not hard to imagine the final result looking somewhat like this given abstention and differing appeals. It looks like the well-off areas went for Melechon if then were part of a major metropole, and went for Le Pen if they are outlying.

[H. Ross Peron]

Mostly for my own curiosity - but the combined scores of the left wing candidates in a bunch of the large cities. Villes-centres only, but enough to profile several different "types" of large city because they aren't at all that homogenous actually. (M) indicates Macron finished first, in all the others Mélenchon did.

Grenoble - 53,5%
Lille - 53,3%
Rennes - 52,8%
Montpellier - 52,1%
Toulouse - 50,1%
Nantes - 48,7%
Strasbourg - 46,1%
Rouen - 45,8%
Besançon - 44,6%
Clermont-Ferrand - 44,2%
Saint-Etienne - 43,7%
Lyon - 43,4% (M)
Caen - 42,8% (M)
Paris - 42,3% (M)
Bordeaux - 42,3% (M - alias - Paris #2)
Nancy - 41,9% (M)
Le Havre - 41,0%
Marseille - 40,3%
Annecy - 34,2% (M)
Reims - 33,6%
Nice - 31,2% (M)
Toulon - 27,2% (Le Pen wins)

Very telling the left did better in Paris than in Marseille.

[parochial boy]

To get back to the electoral analysis, one thing that struck me, and that made it hard to analyze the results at first (and is the reason why projections were slightly off on election night), is the fact that the swings in Ile-de-France were so different from those in the rest of the country. This is very unusual, as usually while IdF is of course electorally distinctive in some ways (most notably by having a very weak FN), it used to be a swing region for most of the Fifth Republic, and even when it wasn't, its overall swings tended to match those of the rest of Metropolitan France. This time though, that wasn't the case.

Because I have an intellectual horror of admitting anything positive about the flipping Parisians, I have been wondering a fair deal about the extent to which IdF patterns hold  up in the other metro areas of France, or the degree to which this was a specifically Grand Paris phenomenon. For instance, Mélenchon's third best department outside of IdF whas Rhône. Rhône! Lyon! And all of a sudden Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes is one of the most left wing regions in the country. I'm sorry but this just isn't... right...

More to the point though, while the Paris metro area is easy to pull out because it is largely coterminous with the Île de France region, it's harder to do that with the other ones. For instance, Lyon stretches across Rhône, Ain and Isère - with the periurban regions of the latter two being much more Le Pen inclined then the combination of city centre, low income banlieues to the east and swanky sububs to the west that you see in the department itself. And most other big cities would fail to even be the singular determining factors in their own departments.

On which note, the Jean Jaurès foundation had some anaylsis on the Mélenchon vote - or the specifically identifying four vague demographic groups building up his support (young people, ethnic minorities, the Dom-Tom, and a certain type of low-mountain rural region with heavy alternative lifestyle types, a contestatary (often protestant) history and heavy public sector dependence). But also, had this summary of how the Mélenchon vote developed from 2017 in a selection large cities:



Point being, it's obviously unsatisfactory in so far as it slices off the banlieues and the exurbs. But, well, the double digit gains are in a variety of types of place. Or at least, the predictably racist reasons that I'm sure we've all seen about why Mélenchon did so well in Seine-Saint-Denis - well - it clearly doesn't apply in a lilly white city like Rennes; nor does it explain the relatively tepid gains in comparison in somewhere like Marseille

[RaphaelDLG]

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?

[Oryxslayer]

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?

I guess cause things are moving back in his direction at the moment, and cause his 55/56% is a stable 55/56%. Le Pen has only led one poll in the last several years, and even when accounting for outliers. Macron's poll numbers are essentially where they were before the campaign, before the Ukraine bump and the inflation/retirement tightening. Essentially, the bell curve of expected outcomes is mostly tight and narrow, even though the 5% tails are wide and large.

That or buyers are a shortsighted lot, your choice.

[vileplume]

Has anyone noted the hilarious irony that Macron is a native of Amiens in the depressed postindustrial north of France, while Le Pen had grown up and currently lives in the posh western suburbs of Paris, in particular Neuilly, Saint-Cloud, and La Celle-Saint-Cloud, basically some of the wealthiest towns in the country. And her father is from Brittany, a region which showed her very little love!

I wonder how these very rich areas would vote in a hypothetical Le Pen vs. Mélenchon Round 2 as these areas obviously can't stand either of them? I imagine they'd hold their noses and vote en masse for Le Pen as her brand of far-rightism is less probably far less threatening to the bourgeoisie types of Neuilly-sur-Seine than Mélenchon's brand of far-leftism. They'd definitely still vote in a landslide against the RN in the legislative elections though.

Another good map that @tuxfak did yesterday. Obviously this is not a full vote, but a comparison of 20-ish percentages, but it is not hard to imagine the final result looking somewhat like this given abstention and differing appeals. It looks like the well-off areas went for Melechon if then were part of a major metropole, and went for Le Pen if they are outlying.

Well that's obviously excluding where voters would go if forced to pick between the two. In Neuilly-sur-Seine for example barely 11% of voters picked Le Pen or Mélenchon in the first round, meaning that there would be 89% up for grabs. I'm not an expert on French politics but I struggle to see rich bourgeoise formerly reliable LR voters ever voting for someone like Mélenchon even if the alternative was Le Pen. These people would certainly be more threatened by Mélenchon's economic platform than Le Pen's and as others have commented on here before these voters aren't exactly known for their social progressivism either.

Maybe wealthy up-and-coming yuppy type areas would back Mélenchon over Le Pen, I'd have to defer to someone with more knowledge than me. But I'd be shocked if there is any scenario where the 'old money' super wealthy areas voted for Mélenchon regardless of who his opponent was.

[Middle-aged Europe]

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?

Macron has been constantly moving away from Le Pen for the past one and a half weeks now, so he definitely has a momentum.

The 56.5% he got in the Ipsos-Sopra Steria poll today was his best polling number since about two weeks before the first round.

Could end up with ca. 60% in the run-off if he outperforms in roughly the same manner he did back in 2017.

[Sir John Johns]

IMO, none of the two candidates are doing a particularly good runoff campaign so far.

Macron has spent the last days throwing random half-baked proposals or thoughts without daring elaborating how he actually intends implementing them. This has included the end of anonymity on the Internet he is opposed to (probably not going to happen), going back to a seven-year-long presidential term (not going to happen), the introduction of full proportional representation in legislative elections (a proposal made by every elected president since decades but never implemented), the creation of an administrative file containing the names of persons suspected of sexual or gender-based violence on the model of the existing file on persons suspected of terrorism (a very dangerous proposal and yet another demonstration of how a measure initially intended to be applied only to the worst criminals is gradually extended to the rest of the population – see the file of genetic prints) or better ventilation in buildings to prevent new pandemics outbreaks (this has been demanded by health professionals since almost two years, to no avail).

Macron also initially partly backtracked on rising the retirement age to 65, suggesting he could settled on 64 and held a referendum on the matter, before Bruno Lemaire indicated today this will be finally 65. He also has confirmed his key proposal to index pensions to inflation starting on next summer (and not waiting January), a measure that however isn’t concerning recipients of welfare benefits and disability allowances nor public sector workers who have saw their purchasing power stagnating or decreasing in the five latest years. He also expressed his willingness to ‘move’ on the ‘deconjugalizing’ of allowances for disabled adults (allowances will be allocated according to the revenue of the sole recipient not no longer on the revenues of his household), a proposal previously supported by all opposition parties but rejected by LREM and its allies in the parliament on the demand of the government. In his meeting in Marseille, he also made various promises on environmental issues like making his next prime minister ‘directly in charge of ecological planning’ and the institution of a ‘Nature Festival’ on the model of the Music Festival (excepted that such festival already exists...) This has been enough for the punditry to talk about an ‘ecological turn’ of Macron but actual environmentalists are skeptic as Macron has previously buried the proposals made by the citizens’ convention for climate he had himself summoned, had replaced the popular Nicolas Hulot (a well-known figure but without much political experience) at the head of the environment ministry by political light weights with zero influence on the government’s policies and has received in the first round the endorsement of the fatty asshole heading the National Hunting Federation.


Meanwhile, Le Pen has toned down her position concerning the prohibition of ‘Islamist outfits’ in the public space, beginning with the Islamic veil, now dubbed as ‘a complex issue’ by the RN which has settled on a ‘progressive’ prohibition that will not concerned ‘the 70-year-old grandmother who is wearing her small veil since years’ but only ‘Islamists’. How they will make the distinction, I don’t know, but the party is still demanding the ‘prohibition of Salafism’. Similarly, Le Pen backtracked on a referendum on reintroducing death penalty she said one day could be hold but said the day after couldn’t be hold becasue she realized ‘it’s unconstitutional’. Le Pen has also repeated her promise to prohibit ritual slaughter of animals in France (kosher and halal alike) but clarified that imports of kosher and halal meats will still been possible; bullfighting will remain legal but could no longer been attended by minors.

On the same time, the RN platform has received greater scrutiny and has been widely criticized for being a collection of unconstitutional, amateurish and/or unrealistic proposals notably in institutional (a lot of debates about whether the promised referendums could be called without the approval of the National Assembly and the Senate), economic (the 0% VAT on staple goods or the reduction of VAT on energy from 20% to 5.5% have been trashed for being at the same time very costly for public finances, benefiting to wealthy people who don’t need them and conflicting with European rules) and energy areas (with an insane program that includes the immediate and complete dismantlement of wind turbines, an end on the construction of new solar parks and the building of no less than 30 EPR nuclear records by 2036, a mammoth project exceeding the building and financial capacity of the French nuclear sector which makes Macron’s own questionable plan to build at best 14 EPR by 2050 looking like very unambitious).

The campaign of the RN candidate is also hurt by Le Pen’s previous and current pro-Russian stances and the rising of a few issues like, for example, Le Pen being banned from entering Ukraine since 2017 (because of her approval of the annexation of Crimea by Russia) or the debt her party is currently owing to a Russian company closed to the Kremlin (electing a woman indebted with Putin may be not the best idea at the moment). And, speaking of what, the very recent investigation of the EU over the misuse of European funds by the RN may also put a spotlight on the catastrophic financial management of the RN since Marine Le Pen has inherited it from Panzerdaddy. For a party that has never received so much public funds thanks to unprecedented electoral success, the RN is actually in a worse financial shape than LR or the PS (whose own situations aren't already not very bright), is losing a lot of money and is massively indebted due notably to exorbitant personnel costs. There have been repeated accusations of the party’s finances being used to cover the lavish lifestyle of the Le Pen family and the RN bigwigs with, just few weeks ago, a minor controversy arisen about how Marine Le Pen is still receiving her €5,000 monthly pay (up from €2,000 in 2017) as president of the party in spite of temporarily no longer holding that office since last September and having delegated it to Jordan Bardella (himself in a relationship with one of the nieces of Marine, so this is remaining in the family) who is currently the acting (but unpaid) president of the RN.

Also, Le Pen has failed to get any ‘surprise’ public endorsement, notably from prominent leaders of LR or other right-wing mainstream parties. The only meaningful supports she has received are the predictable ones of Zemmour (who has however previously labeled her as ‘a left-wing woman’), Dupont-Aignan (just like five years ago but he has since lost a lot of support and respectability) and Florian Philippot (who has however indicated in the days before the first round he would endorse whoever would face Macron in the runoff, a good indication on how serious this guy should be considered nowadays). On the other hand, Robert Ménard (independent but elected with the support of the RN), one of the few far-right mayors of a sizable commune in France, has distanced himself from the RN candidate and renounced to campaign for her. Even if he has indicated he would still vote for Le Pen in the runoff, Ménard has recently praised Macron’s leadership in the Ukrainian crisis and criticized the RN’s stances on COVID-19 vaccines and Russia.

The possible defection of Ménard would add to the long series of departures of FN/RN cadres since 2017, a pretty lengthy list that includes Marion Maréchal, Florian Philippot, Sophie Montel, Nicolas Bay, Stéphane Ravier, Gilbert Collard, Bernard Monot, Jean Messiha, Jérôme Rivière or Maxette Pirbakas. Such successive waves of departures aren’t offset by the arrival of former LR members like Thierry Mariani, Jean-Paul Garraud or Nicolas Dhuicq (who has hilariously decamped to Zemmour’s party in last February but, at the light of the bad opinion polls, dumped the former TV pundit to endorse Le Pen the week before the first round) and raise the question about with whom Le Pen would constitute her administration and whether the RN could keep its grip on the government or lose it to technocrats or people coming from the Maréchal-Zemmour faction (assuming they are able to overcome all the bad blood left by the recent split) or the most right-wing part of LR.

But, clearly Le Pen seems to have failed gaining momentum and the last opportunity to relaunch her campaign will be tomorrow’s TV debate with Macron. Will anyway probably not mattered as much as turnout and transfers from Mélenchon’s first round voters on next Sunday.

[Antonio the Sixth]

To get back to the electoral analysis, one thing that struck me, and that made it hard to analyze the results at first (and is the reason why projections were slightly off on election night), is the fact that the swings in Ile-de-France were so different from those in the rest of the country. This is very unusual, as usually while IdF is of course electorally distinctive in some ways (most notably by having a very weak FN), it used to be a swing region for most of the Fifth Republic, and even when it wasn't, its overall swings tended to match those of the rest of Metropolitan France. This time though, that wasn't the case.

Because I have an intellectual horror of admitting anything positive about the flipping Parisians, I have been wondering a fair deal about the extent to which IdF patterns hold  up in the other metro areas of France, or the degree to which this was a specifically Grand Paris phenomenon. For instance, Mélenchon's third best department outside of IdF whas Rhône. Rhône! Lyon! And all of a sudden Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes is one of the most left wing regions in the country. I'm sorry but this just isn't... right...

More to the point though, while the Paris metro area is easy to pull out because it is largely coterminous with the Île de France region, it's harder to do that with the other ones. For instance, Lyon stretches across Rhône, Ain and Isère - with the periurban regions of the latter two being much more Le Pen inclined then the combination of city centre, low income banlieues to the east and swanky sububs to the west that you see in the department itself. And most other big cities would fail to even be the singular determining factors in their own departments.

On which note, the Jean Jaurès foundation had some anaylsis on the Mélenchon vote - or the specifically identifying four vague demographic groups building up his support (young people, ethnic minorities, the Dom-Tom, and a certain type of low-mountain rural region with heavy alternative lifestyle types, a contestatary (often protestant) history and heavy public sector dependence). But also, had this summary of how the Mélenchon vote developed from 2017 in a selection large cities:



Point being, it's obviously unsatisfactory in so far as it slices off the banlieues and the exurbs. But, well, the double digit gains are in a variety of types of place. Or at least, the predictably racist reasons that I'm sure we've all seen about why Mélenchon did so well in Seine-Saint-Denis - well - it clearly doesn't apply in a lilly white city like Rennes; nor does it explain the relatively tepid gains in comparison in somewhere like Marseille

Indeed, if anything this suggests a major swing of the vaguely leftish urban bobo types toward Mélenchon (and presumably, away from Macron). Which is certainly interesting, since those are not the type of former PS, Macron-curious voters that I would have expected to come back to Mélenchon (it's certainly telling that he's down in a lot of the rural Southwest and Massif Central areas - Roussel definitely took votes away from him there, but it's still not enough to explain the underperformance).

So, the bottom line appears to be that the left vote is boboifying even further, somehow. Not a kind of trend that bodes well for its future, and should probably relativize celebrations of Mélenchon's success as indicating a future path for the French left.