April 11, 2022 - 9:00am
Almost against expectations, President Emmanuel Macron topped the poll by more than four points in the first round of the French presidential elections yesterday.
Macron may not be everyone’s hero. And he is not yet home free. The second round of the election, a re-match of 2017, will be a much closer-run thing. Opinion polls yesterday gave Macron a lead over the far-Right leader Marine Le Pen varying from 54-46% to 51-49%.
All the same, this was an excellent result for Macron. Over the last month Le Pen has surged by 7 points in the opinion polls and seemed capable of building even greater momentum by snatching first position yesterday. Despite outpolling her polls with 23.41%, she ended further behind Macron than she did in the first round in 2017.
In truth Macron is detested by many people in France, especially on parts of the Left. He should prevail on 24 April but Le Pen’s chances cannot be written off (as they could in 2017 even before her calamitous TV debate performance).
Macron lost to Le Pen yesterday in every category of age except the over-65’s, who voted in enormous numbers and disproportionately (41%) for the President. His high overall score — 27.6% — was swollen by last-minute Le Pen-fearing transfers from the centre-Right and the centre-Left.
As a result, the reservoir of potential extra votes for Macron in Round Two is depleted. The centre-Right candidate Valérie Pécresse — once tipped as Macron’s greatest danger — was reduced to a woeful 4.79%.
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Subscribe‘Macron lost to Le Pen yesterday in every category of age except the over-65’s’. Remember 2016, when many of those outraged by Brexit demanded that the over 65s should be disenfranchised? If they’d had their way in France in 2022, Mme Le Pen would be heading for the Elysee. You have to laugh really.
Yes, this was something thjat I noticed too. It’s interesting, is it that older French are more inclined to stick with the status quo than older Britons? Or is it that they are more globalist? I’m inclined to think the former. Of course they could all think that Macron has done a brilliant job, you can never tell.
Linda, Gavin Mortimer in today’s Spectator has what looks (to me) like a plausible explanation:
‘Those whose working lives are over, those on – in general – comfortable pensions with no mortgage are content with the incumbent. This is also the demographic who most approved of Macron’s draconian Covid measures, the passport, the masks, the shutting down of society. This is the generation of ‘Soixante-huitards’, Baby Boomers to Brits. Half a century ago they were radicals and revolutionaries but in their dotage they are rather smitten with their ‘president of the rich’.’
Maybe they could disenfranchise them before the second ballot
I notice the label ‘far-Right’ gets an outing again but only a ‘scattered Left’.
The numbers as quoted suggest a more balanced Right/Centre/Left split.
She hasn’t a prayer sadly. She needs a 16% swing from 2017 to win, and nothing in the first round results suggested that is possible. The Right was in power for three quarters of the time from 1958 to 2012, but now will be in opposition for at least 15 years. Candidates to Macron’s right won just 37% of the vote yesterday, compared to 47% for Sarkozy, Le Pen and NDA in 2012. Due to demographic change, conservative minded voters sense they are losing their country and are flailing around, but based on these results the Right will struggle to win a national election in France ever again, In fact Le Pen only scraped into the second round by squeezing Zemmour and Pecresse to almost nothing. She’ll do well to get to 40% on the next day out.
I believe the margins will be much closer this year than in 2017.
However, Marine Le Pen has been doomed by a lot of disinformation by calling her “Far Right-Wing”. It seems to me that every candidate who supports any semblance of nationalism nowadays gets this label thrown at them to discredit their beliefs.
This branding makes it so Le Pen will never be able to win a second round as it scares center-right voters who might be able to make a majority over Macron into voting for him instead. Just look at Pecresse losing to Macron only to endorse him because she is more of Le Pen.
In future elections the right wing in France needs to focus on the media before political issues. Ask them to truly define what fine line separates a traditional right wing candidate to the fear mongering term of far-right is the only way forward.
This has been organised so well many times, all the ‘others’ are carefully eliminated by false voting, leaving the nominated successor and the unacceptable Le Pen alone to stand, deliberately the French state organises this to get what they want. Since De-Gaul’s formation of Elf Oil, the French leadership has been totally corrupt, see https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/07/tota-j11.html
The majority of French Presidents since WW2 have been involved in the oil. This has been he source of all the cash they used to buy Colne and all the other European Politicians to build the ‘Common Market’, remember the black suitcases that featured at every meeting all those years ago.
Macron has concentrated on bating Britain and Russia, along with the USA, they now have their reward which Ukraine is paying for.