French presidential election, 2022

[parochial boy]

Is there somewhere tracking who is getting close to the 500 nominations?

Everybody is at 0 so far, we are not that step yet.

Less than 3 months to go to the voting, seems like they leave this quite late.

The period to collect them ends 6 weeks before the first round and begins when the "summons for electors" is published "at least 10 weeks before the first round". So it would theoretically start next week at the latest.

Of course, the candidates are all busy calling mayors at this very moment to try and get promises of signatures - it's just that they can't yet be officially submitted, and as such there is no official record of who has nominated who exactly. So the only thing to go on is what the candidates themselves are saying, which obviously involves a fair degree of political gaming.

[adma]

Well, where are the people who put Hollande over the top in 2012? Who are they supporting now?

About 50% are supporting Macron, or so I heard on a podcast I'm listening to.

Remember that Hollande got sizeable transfers from Centrist voters because Sarkozy was a genuinely horrible, corrupt person and that people should remember that Macron, despite the Benalla affair, doesn't have the abuse of power affairs that Sarkozy had.

adma needs to stop comparing French politics to Canadian politics though.

The electoral systems are different (so yes, a leftist may vote Macron in second round, doesn't mean they support him or like him - and more and more say they will abstain, otherwise Pécresse wouldn't be close in 2nd round polling)

And the cleavages are different.

Trudeau and Macron are put side by side by a weird bunch of international journalists who see them as from the same political tradition of milktoast post-2000 neoliberalism when Macron is really sui generis and a couple of statements on climate change being bad and multilateralism being good doesn't necessarily make him a liberal.

Re Pecresse being close in 2nd round polling: that'd still roughly correspond w/ the "left + Macron" vs "right" figures, wouldn't it?

No, it corresponds to the Left (whatever the  that means in French politics these days) abstaining en masse alongside large chunks of the Right, but Pécresse being aided by some core elements of the Right transferring to her including Macronistes swing voters from the center-right lending their vote to her in the event of a close contest. I think the Pécresse/Macron map will be very interesting for sure because it will sui generis and based on a lot of things like personality, local contacts and regional power figures etc.

I don't think we can say for sure yet that the second round map will be a Left-Right map of old.

If you're going to frame it in *those* terms, then the Canadian equivalent might be (for the sake of hypothesis) a second-round British Columbia election where the NDP's eliminated and the race is btw/the big-tent right-establishment BC Liberals and, I suppose, a revived BC Conservative party or some force further to the right...

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

What chance is there currently that when all is said and done, Le Pen misses the second round?

[PSOL]

What is the status of Poutou and Kazib?

[Sir John Johns]

Zemmour has received these last days the endorsement of two relatively important members of the RN who have jumped ship from Le Pen’s campaign.

The first one is Jérôme Rivière, currently a MEP and, until his departure from the RN, the head of its delegation to Brussels. A former UMP deputy from Alpes-Maritimes (in the constituency currently held by Éric Ciotti), he joined De Villiers’ MPF in 2007 before becoming a member of the FN in 2015, at a time when the MPF was no longer a thing. Rivière was one of the spokesmen for Le Pen’s campaign (he is now holding the same job in Zemmour) and an adviser of the RN candidate for defense matters. Being largely unknown by French voters at large and considered as marginalized in the RN, he isn’t a decisive addition to Zemmour’s campaign but having the head of your party caucus in European Parliament decamping in the middle of your campaign isn’t good publicity for Le Pen.

The second one is Gilbert Collard, also currently a MEP, after having been a FN/RN deputy from Gard between 2012 and 2020. Unlike Rivière, Collard is a quite famous figure, firstly as a lawyer in high-profile criminal cases since the 1970s (he had his puppet in the Guignols de l'Info satirical show twenty years ago, always introduced as 'Gilbert Collard, lawyer at the court, on radio and on TV') and thereafter, since his election as a deputy as a frequent guest in political talk shows.

His political career is really odd, from being a member of the SFIO and the PS in the 1970s and 1980s to a supporter of Pierre Boussel (aka ‘Lambert’) who ran for president in 1988 as the candidate of a Trotskyist party (the Movement for a Workers’ Party, ex-Internationalist Communist Organization, ex-Internationalist Communist Party later successively renamed the Workers’ Party in 1991, the Independent Workers’ Party in 2008 and the Democratic Independent Workers’ Party in 2015 when the majority of the party led by its two most recent presidential candidates, the incredibly dull Daniel Gluckstein and the more ‘folkloric’ Gérard Schivardi, left to found a new party). Collard unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Vichy as the candidate of a right-wing alliance in 2001 and as the candidate of the New Center in 2008 (since then renamed ‘The Centerists’, a satellite party of the UMP/LR led by Hervé Morin after he left the Modem in 2007 with the pro-Sarkozy faction of that party) before officially endorsing Marine Le Pen in 2011. He didn’t became a member of the FN for a long time however due to personal grievance with Panzerdaddy (he was the lawyer of this latter’s first wife during their divorce proceedings) and has be critical of the ‘dediabolization’ strategy.

Like Rivière, he was an increasingly marginal figure in the RN (him going from a national deputy to a MEP could be seen as a demotion) and is more representative of the traditional FN electorate of Southern France than the recently conquered electorate of deindustrialized North.

[Conservatopia]

You say Collard's career is odd but isn't it actually fairly standard for many French rightists to start of as trots? Like a certain former president?

[MaxQue]

You say Collard's career is odd but isn't it actually fairly standard for many French rightists to start of as trots? Like a certain former president?

Except he spent 20 years in SFIO/PS before going over to the trots.

[Zinneke]

Collard's pathway to the Right was pretty unique but recently there has been an influx of the equivalent of concern trolls who are nominally Left but are at this point adverts for the left to extreme Right vote.  Michel Onfray for example basically all but endorsing Zemmour at this point, Brice Couturier and his insane obsession with wokism, Caroline Fourest...there should be a sociological study into these people.

One figure I can't discern is whether Roussel basically wants to incarnate that movement or if he is a more serious communist candidate...

[PSOL]

Collard's pathway to the Right was pretty unique but recently there has been an influx of the equivalent of concern trolls who are nominally Left but are at this point adverts for the left to extreme Right vote.  Michel Onfray for example basically all but endorsing Zemmour at this point, Brice Couturier and his insane obsession with wokism, Caroline Fourest...there should be a sociological study into these people.

One figure I can't discern is whether Roussel basically wants to incarnate that movement or if he is a more serious communist candidate...

The PCF hasn’t been for communism since the 60s when they complicity endorsed France’s imperialism in Algeria.

[Sir John Johns]

You say Collard's career is odd but isn't it actually fairly standard for many French rightists to start of as trots? Like a certain former president?

Except he spent 20 years in SFIO/PS before going over to the trots.

Yes, going from SFIO/PS to a Trostkyist small party is very unusual. This was traditionally working the other way with the Trotskyists (especially of the ‘Lambertist’ flavor) practicing entryism into the Socialist Party, generally to rapidly morph into generic social democrats/social liberals (see Lionel Jospin or Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, the right-hand man of Strauss-Kahn, you would have hard time considering as a left-wing extremist). Mélenchon was also a member of the OCI before joining the PS. The oddity with Collard is also that, by the late 1980s, the Trotskyist movement in general and the OCI in particular, which was embroiled in a series of purges/departures, had fallen out of favor.

Collard's pathway to the Right was pretty unique but recently there has been an influx of the equivalent of concern trolls who are nominally Left but are at this point adverts for the left to extreme Right vote.  Michel Onfray for example basically all but endorsing Zemmour at this point, Brice Couturier and his insane obsession with wokism, Caroline Fourest...there should be a sociological study into these people.

One figure I can't discern is whether Roussel basically wants to incarnate that movement or if he is a more serious communist candidate...

For Roussel, whatever his intentions are, it should be noted that what have been widely publicized is the fact that he wants poor to eat good quality meat and drink wine. But the concrete measures he would take to reach such result are never been discussed. In the end, this is still stupid culture wars prevailing over economic issues. His gimmick is still entirely in line with Georges Marchais’ produire français (‘producing French’) slogan and the PCF campaign in the 1950s against Coca-Cola it contrasted with the French ‘good wine’:

On the other hand, Roussel also defended in last October a bill to render ineligible people convicted for racism or antisemitism, which should have logically led him to be labeled as a ‘woke’ but this didn’t happened...


On a related note, the opposition between Roussel and Mélenchon on a series of political topics is becoming quite caricatural: when Mélenchon is talking about animal well-being and receiving the endorsement of a relatively famous animal rights defender, Roussel is supporting hunting even when involving cruel practices; when Roussel is loudly proclaiming his support to nuclear energy, Mélenchon is advocating the end of that energy in terms that even I, a nuclear skeptical, can’t accept (between the exaggeration of the dangers of nuclear energy and the promotion of offshore wind turbines and whatever system is using the Papeete hospital as the magic solution); when Roussel is meeting butchers, Mélenchon is calling for the end of factory farming.

[Zendstrummer]

Is Macron basically guaranteed to win?

[Oryxslayer]

Is Macron basically guaranteed to win?

No, but the many-sided dice of election outcomes is almost all yellow. Macron is popular enough by French standards, the conservative opposition is fragmented, and the left have basically given up. So a slot in the runoff is all but guaranteed. Zemmour would need to resurge to actually get into the runoff, but he appears to guarantee a Macron victory in said runoff. Le Pen and Pécresse - more likely Le Pen of the two - still could get an upset in the coming three months, but that would be a reversal of the current trajectories.

[VPH]

Like Rivière, he was an increasingly marginal figure in the RN (him going from a national deputy to a MEP could be seen as a demotion) and is more representative of the traditional FN electorate of Southern France than the recently conquered electorate of deindustrialized North.

Imo Zemmour's platform and appeal is more "old FN" than "new FN". Less post-industrial than Le Pen's appeal. I could be wrong, but I think that will show in the results too.

[PSOL]

Is Macron basically guaranteed to win?

Yes

[Sir John Johns]

Like Rivière, he was an increasingly marginal figure in the RN (him going from a national deputy to a MEP could be seen as a demotion) and is more representative of the traditional FN electorate of Southern France than the recently conquered electorate of deindustrialized North.

Imo Zemmour's platform and appeal is more "old FN" than "new FN". Less post-industrial than Le Pen's appeal. I could be wrong, but I think that will show in the results too.

Indeed, the platform of Zemmour is reminiscent of the one of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 1980s which was mixing historical Poujadism (opposition to taxation and bureaucracy from the point of view of small shopkeepers and craftsmen) and inspiration from Reaganism with the required healthy dose of racism, xenophobia and antisemitism. This is arguably also the period where the FN leader made his most heinous declarations.

Comparison could be also draw with Bruno Mégret, who led a split from the FN, the MNR, in the late 1990s at a time when Le Pen had drifted toward a much more anti-establishment/anti-system posture. I don’t remember much of his economic platform (immigration and insecurity remained the core of his program) but Mégret, who originally came from the RPR, was much more vocal than Le Pen against the PS (calling Jospin the leader of the most extremist left-wing government in Europe when Le Pen stated that Chirac was worse than Jospin) and a strong advocate of the so-called union des droites (‘union of the rights’, i.e. making political alliances with mainstream right-wing parties, especially the RPR) in spite of, like Zemmour, harboring in his party and satellite organizations the most radical and extremist elements from the far-right, including neo-nazis (a MNR candidate for 2001 municipal elections attempted to murder Chirac on 14 July 2002).

There is also seemingly a difference in the social background of the party officials of Zemmour’s new party and Marine Le Pen’s RN. In the latter, figures like Jordan Bardella (coming from a humble background and who grew up in a deprived banlieue – now he is dating a girl of the Le Pen family) or Steeve Briois (mayor of Hénin-Beaumont, a city hard hit by deindustrialization) are put forward to illustrate the opening of the party to popular classes. Meanwhile, the new faces which are acting as the spokesmen of Zemmour (Antoine Diers, Stanislas Rigault) seems to be born with silver spoons in their mouths (there are not much information about their background, actually) and sporting a very bourgeois appearance with Diers even having the mustache and the haircut of someone trying to impersonate an aristocrat from the nineteenth century. Diers has been a municipal councilor in Lambersart (a wealthy suburb of Lille) and, until very recently, the chief of staff to the mayor of Le Plessis-Robinson, a posh commune in Hauts-de-Seine, so presumably not someone very much in touch with lower classes.

Actually, the emergence of Zemmour may have force Le Pen to stick to her demagogic economical platform (mixing defense of social programs and public services with tax cuts and no indication how she intends to finance this) when she has started, since her disastrous performance in the 2017 debate (with her plan to withdraw from euro nobody, not even her seemingly, understood), to move to more openly pro-business/financially orthodox positions aiming at acquiring some credibility in economic matters and reassuring pensioners (not fans of ill-prepared economic experiences) with the abandonment of any reference to a withdrawal from euro, the rejection of any plan to cancel public debt and the promotion of ‘common sense’ and ‘sound management’ on that matter (that was in February 2021, this topic has now been totally sidelined) and the discussion that took place inside the party about considering dropping the promise to lower the legal retirement age back to 60 (finally, this is still defended by Le Pen), a proposal also defended by Mélenchon but not Hidalgo nor Jadot (who are advocating keeping the current legal age of 62).

[MaxQue]

Is there somewhere tracking who is getting close to the 500 nominations?

Everybody is at 0 so far, we are not that step yet.

Less than 3 months to go to the voting, seems like they leave this quite late.

The period to collect them ends 6 weeks before the first round and begins when the "summons for electors" is published "at least 10 weeks before the first round". So it would theoretically start next week at the latest.

Of course, the candidates are all busy calling mayors at this very moment to try and get promises of signatures - it's just that they can't yet be officially submitted, and as such there is no official record of who has nominated who exactly. So the only thing to go on is what the candidates themselves are saying, which obviously involves a fair degree of political gaming.

Seems the degree will pass the Cabinet on Wednesday and be published on Thursday, and the Conseil Constitutionnel will publish updates every Tuesday and Thursday from that point.

[CascadianIndy]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/01/25/francois-hollande-says-ready-comeback-french-left-descends-chaos/?utm_content=world%20news&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1643123716

Just in case the French left wasn't divided enough.

[jaichind]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/01/25/francois-hollande-says-ready-comeback-french-left-descends-chaos/?utm_content=world%20news&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1643123716

Just in case the French left wasn't divided enough.

Wow.  This reminds me of all the various Hillary Clinton comeback rumors.

[PSOL]

Hollande only takes votes away from Hidalgo, so he’s sinking both of their campaigns and PS’s existence.

I approve wholeheartedly.

[Zinneke]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/01/25/francois-hollande-says-ready-comeback-french-left-descends-chaos/?utm_content=world%20news&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1643123716

Just in case the French left wasn't divided enough.

I'd actually vote for him. It's so brazen that it's what France deserves.

[parochial boy]

As far as the hillarious exponential growth of left candidates goes - it's worth sort of pointing out, well a couple of things.

The idea of some sole figure emerging and uniting the left is illusory, such is the divisions, like big ideological and demographic ones, that exist on the left. By now, we have a fairly consistent picture from the various polling on second choice and hypotheticals that indicates a pretty big chunk of Jadot and Hidalgo's electorates would prefer Macron over Méluche should it come to it - and a while Jadot does well among Mélenchon supporters, in the event of Mélenchon not standing - his electorate would splinter across the board and into abstentionism. You can't just glue the left candidates together and expect that to work out.

Or, more to the point, the multiplication of left candidates and the mediocre polling both individually and collectively points to one thing in particular - the weakness of the left wing candidates who are standing. The reason they're all floundering in the single figures is that none of them has a message, a line, an anything that is unifying enough or frankly good enough to go beyond that.

Speaking of demographics - the Jean Jaurès foundation has some interesting stuff about where Hollande's 2012 electorate is now. The answer is split fairly evenly between 1/3 going Macron, 1/3 combining for the ex-"left government" candidates of Taubira/Jadot/Hidalgo and the remaining third all over the place though. More to the point, and reflecting the big change since 2012 is that only 58% of said electorate even consider themselves as being "left wing" anymore (compared to over 70% at the time); with the Hollande-Macron switchers having overwhelmingly abandoned their left-wing self perception.

[Oryxslayer]

Or, more to the point, the multiplication of left candidates and the mediocre polling both individually and collectively points to one thing in particular - the weakness of the left wing candidates who are standing. The reason they're all floundering in the single figures is that none of them has a message, a line, an anything that is unifying enough or frankly good enough to go beyond that.

Which of course is a endless issue in and of itself. If "The Left" collectively does not think it can get into round 2 against Macron, then all the candidates who actually could excite people stay out and the overall quality lowers. Since nobody dynamic is consolidating the field, other 'B listers' see the B listers that are running floundering and think "well I'm as good as them, I can save us!" And so the field multiplies.

[xelas81]

Or, more to the point, the multiplication of left candidates and the mediocre polling both individually and collectively points to one thing in particular - the weakness of the left wing candidates who are standing. The reason they're all floundering in the single figures is that none of them has a message, a line, an anything that is unifying enough or frankly good enough to go beyond that.

Which of course is a endless issue in and of itself. If "The Left" collectively does not think it can get into round 2 against Macron, then all the candidates who actually could excite people stay out and the overall quality lowers. Since nobody dynamic is consolidating the field, other 'B listers' see the B listers that are running floundering and think "well I'm as good as them, I can save us!" And so the field multiplies.

Who are?
IMO fundamental problem is that there aren't enough left-of center voters in France.

[PSOL]

Or, more to the point, the multiplication of left candidates and the mediocre polling both individually and collectively points to one thing in particular - the weakness of the left wing candidates who are standing. The reason they're all floundering in the single figures is that none of them has a message, a line, an anything that is unifying enough or frankly good enough to go beyond that.

Which of course is a endless issue in and of itself. If "The Left" collectively does not think it can get into round 2 against Macron, then all the candidates who actually could excite people stay out and the overall quality lowers. Since nobody dynamic is consolidating the field, other 'B listers' see the B listers that are running floundering and think "well I'm as good as them, I can save us!" And so the field multiplies.

Who are?
IMO fundamental problem is that there aren't enough left-of center voters in France.

That is purely the fault of the centre-left being nonexistent and a joke in France ever since PS’s implosion.

[DL]

Hasn't a segment of the PS moved into Macron's party as well? Let's not forget that Macron got his start as Economics Minister in Francois Hollande's government so he has likely sucked up a lot of the more "third way"/centrist types from the PS