French presidential election, 2022

[MaxQue]

OK, I should sum up like Zinneke for the right.


DECLARED:

Xavier Bertrand (President of the Hauts-de-France region)
Valérie Pécresse (President of the Île-de-France region)
Michel Barnier (former head of EU UK Task Force)
Eric Ciotti (Deputy for Alpes-Maritimes 1)
Philippe Juvin (former MEP for Île-de-France)

DECLINED:

Laurent Wauquiez (former head of LR, President of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes)

UNDECLARED:

Bruno Retailleau (President of the LR group in the Senate)
David Lisnard (deputy president of Alpes-Maritimes)


Bertrand does not want to participate in the primary and is hoping to emerge as the "natural" candidate without one; as far as I know, all the others support a primary and stress the importance of unity. On the Le Figaro website, the open poll has 58% support for a primary.

Anyway, it looked like Pécresse and Bertrand were the frontrunners, though who knows now. Bertand/Pécresse/Barnier seem to be going after the left-wing of the right, with Ciotti running hard on the right. They all stress the security theme (Pécresse was making something about the threat to pharmacists and carers), but it seems like Ciotti is really going after the FN line of identity and immigration, the need to "remain French" and so on. My guess is that Barnier would go down the competence, unity line and maybe stress economic issues more.

Retailleau is very popular with Fillon loyalists and devout Catholics, and I think is essentially the only one who is going after an electorate restricted and loyal to LR (right-wing Catholics who don't like Le Pen, traditionalists, Fillon obsessives), whereas the others seem to want to peel votes off Macron or Le Pen. FWIW my preferred candidate is probably Barnier, though I don't see the point of him and Macron both running.

Retailleau also declined today.

[MaxQue]

Effortpost.

I was under the impression Pecresse was more on the right of the party than on the NKM, Bertrand side.

It will be interesting to see if Macron leans into the left again in his campaign this time round or whether he tries to point to his record in government in order to appeal to the right.  Both carry risks for the second round of course.

I'm not that familiar but I get the impression she's on the left of the party - she called for Fillon to step down in 2017 (though that's not strictly a left/right thing) and criticised Wauquiez for being too close to the far right. May be wrong though.

Pécresse is not in the party anymore, she left in 2019 to create her own party, Soyons Libres, because she thinks the party is too right-wing right now, refuses to consider green issues, has abandoned the values of the UMP and voted against some common sense reforms made by Macron (mainly on university and railroad reforms).

[MaxQue]

Is anyone besides Hidalgo, PS or otherwise, running in the socialist primary? Not that it matters much in the grand scheme of things.

The socialist primary was last weekend and she beated Le Foll, agriculture minister under Hollande, who then refused to endorse her.

[MaxQue]

Oh my f**king God

what did Zemmour say about the Dreyfus affair? Do I even want to know? Probably not

That, maybe, Dreyfus was really a German spy.

[MaxQue]

2. So many xenophobic references to "the other" and a message of hate towards anyone who isn't traditional French, white catholic etc.... and yet Zemmour himself is a rather foreign looking little nebbish who is himself a North African Jew - in other words he himself personifies the exact type of person who the French right has traditionally "othered" and vilified...

Then again, it was often noted that some of leading Nazis who went on and on about the German master race were very UNaryan-looking weaklings (i.e. Hitler and Himmler). Hitler was rather dark and swarthy and was rumoured to be part Jewish and Himmler was apparently a very effeminate child who played with dolls and would dress like a girl...he went on to spearhead the Nazi attempt to exterminate gay men....sigh. Its almost too facile to see the self-hate at work with these guys

Very classy to compare a Jewish candidate for public office to Nazis and to comment on his appearance in a way you would never do with a black, Muslim or female candidate.

Well, said candidate also said that the Pétain régime wasn't all bad and that maybe Dreyfus was really a spy, so, your Jewish candidate is hitting all the anti-semitic tropes.

[MaxQue]

All of the right-wing politicians are also doing some sort of pilgrimage to Armenia because its a core constituency.

Do you mean America? Why would French politicians care about Armenia?

It's a Christian country who was oppressed/slaugthered by the evil dirty Moslem Turkish Ottomans, you see.

[MaxQue]

Is there anywhere where we can find out how many signatures the various candidates have?

It will be on the Conseil Constitutionnel website once the process has began (the signature period being between ten weeks before the first turn and the 6th Friday before the first turn). So it should be from the week of January 31st to March 4th. Note the exact date will be determined by a decree of Macron.

Note a wierd quick of the system is that mayors are sending themselves their signatures to the Conseil, so some people who are not candidates will get signatures.

[MaxQue]

A croissant on the Eiffel Tower is a fantastic idea.

Anyway Macron getting a suprising blowback from all sides for his comments about pissing off antivaxxers.

I think the only side he is trying to please there is electors.

[MaxQue]

Might be shooting this off a bit early, but Méluche does seem to have established a slightly bigger gap in terms of being the best polling candidate of the left in recent weeks. Certainly more so than back in the Autumn when Jadot looked close to drawing even. Yannick seems to be faltering a bit at the moment, not at Hidalgo levels, but not great.

That makes it especially pathetic that he refuses to participate in a left primary, given that he'd probably win it easily. I would happily vote for him if he beat Hidalgo and others fair and square.

I don't think his ego would accept being put on equal footing with other inferior and impure left-wing candidates.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[MaxQue]

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.

Yep and Melenchon is the poor victim who makes attempts to build bridges with the left-wing voters he needs, gotchya!

Why allow perpetual losers and wreckers into your party? Melenchon already took several PS machines propped up by reformists, he already has most of the working class vote and it’s not like adding yuppies, trust fund bleeding heart types, and wannabes would do much for him.

Also, Melenchon is the major force of the French centre-left, and boy while he has problems, bottom feeders and turncoats he knows to repel.

No. His support is actually quite educated. It's telling the only 5000+ towns run by his party have below average shares of "ouvriers", while having above average shares of managers and people in "intellectual jobs".

His base is young university graduates, pretty much.

[MaxQue]

Also, Hidalgo was the best of the 2 candidates in the Socialist primary, her opponent was Stéphane Le Foll, Hollande's Agriculture minister, which pretty much want to transform the PS into a En Marche satellite party.

[MaxQue]

I think most people would regard Arthaud’s party as a cult, that in mind, can anyone explain why they’ve got more nominees than established party’s like Melenchon, Jadot or Le Pen?

Cult members are efficient and dedicated?

[MaxQue]

More and more, people are recognizing that Emmanuel Macron is, mostly by default, the best president of the Fifth Republic.

He really isn't (and if you asked French people about it in a poll they'd clearly tell you that), but what he is is better than any of the candidates who have any shot of qualifying for the runoff.

Genuine question. Who the French would say was the best President? I doubt Hollande, Sarko or Chirac would feature there.

[MaxQue]

What is considered to be the main "legacy' of Francois Mitterrand? I know he was President for 14 years so that makes him a symbol of an era - but what did he actually accomplish. I vaguely remember him bringing in a bunch radical reforms in his first year, then becoming extremely unpopular and backtracking on almost everything and then him being extremely UNpopular almost all the time he was President but having an uncanny ability to outfox his opponents when it came to managing co-habitation and getting re-elected...but it seems to me that his only real legacy was that he occupied the post of President - not that he actually did much with the job. 

Death penalty abolition, legalizing gay sex and the big decentralisation law? Still support your point, as all of these happened in the first 2 years.

[MaxQue]

Are there Zemourist candidates running in the legislative election?

There will be, he created his own party (Reconquête).

[MaxQue]

As we were discussing 2 months ago, now it's become clear that only 3 candidates will have a large number of votes: Macron, Le Pen and Mélenchon. The others will have single digit. In the final days, some candidates atract useful votes.

Melenchon is still in quite a distant third. And I don’t think you can rule out Pecresse getting ahead of him by the end if Zemmour continues to slide.

Looking at Pécresse campaign, through, I think the question for her is below or above 10%. Same for Zemmour.

[MaxQue]

French far-right leader Le Pen softens image for election
French nationalist Marine Le Pen has softened her rhetoric and her image as she tries to unseat centrist President Emmanuel Macron in the upcoming election, taking place in two rounds on April 10 and 24

Macron has moved so far to the right that he might be to Le Pen's right at this point.

Is this hyperbole or do we have concrete examples?

It is hyperbole, although it's true that the difference between the RN and supposedly "respectable" parties has never been so slight.

I'm actually thinking Marine Le Pen as president wouldn't be that worse than Macron; my big fears are the FN people she would appoint to her Cabinet and all the local unvetted closet fascists elected to the Assembly.

[MaxQue]

1. Runoff polling is in general of questionable value until the first round is complete and this particular poll was conducted by a Brazilian firm with no track record in France. Polling for this election is extremely frequent (arguably too frequent!) and nearly all recent polls show Macron with a hypothetical second round lead of between six and four points. More have shown larger leads (ten points, eight points etc) than have shown a deficit.

This is true, but why expect Le Pen will decline after the first round? I would think a surprising strong showing (for those who don't religiously follow polling) and reconciliation with Zemmour and (some) Pécresse supporters will improve her standing.

Because that what happened in most elections. FN/RN polling worse in runoffs polls after 1st turn and then performing worse than polls on election day.

[MaxQue]

  As President, wouldn't Le Pen have the power to have referenda held on various issues, regardless of what an unfriendly national assembly would like?

No, a referendum needs President + PM or President + both chambers.

[MaxQue]

https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1513115084591095814?s=20&t=eNyci1I70...
Apparently S-S-D turnout is down 10%, which should be both a symbol of the Left's disunity and the fact that Melenchon isn't a good replacement.

Lower turnout sounds good for Le Pen, I think? The 2017 voter - 2022 non-voter sounds like someone who was energized to defeat fascism five years ago and nowadays simply doesn’t care.

There was lower turnout than expected in the regional election and it was mainly the RN who did worst than the polls, so, usually, low turnout would be bad for her, actually. In general, low turnout means the youth didn't vote.

[MaxQue]

33% for the other candidates seems really high.

[MaxQue]

When's the earliest we'll get reliable poll results?

The ones at poll closure should quite reliable, as only a part of it will be an exit poll (as rural areas polls close 1 hour earlier).