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The first time that Emmanuel Macron faced Marine LePenin the second round of the 2017 elections, pulverized his opponent at the polls.
At that time, the current president managed to enter the Elysee with 66.06% compared to 33.94% of Le Pen’s votes.
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But in the current contest, in which both will be measured again on April 24, it will not be so easy for the European leader to beat his rival.
Estimates from this round show how the tactical vote rewrote the electoral map of France.
At the close of this Sunday, with 95% of the schools counted, Macron obtained 27.4% of the ballots in the first round, while Le Pen obtained 24%.
The voters gathered around three broad fields: Macron, the extreme right and the extreme left. In the last days of the campaign, many people who were considering other candidates finally decided to endorse one of the favorites.
Thus, there was a huge transfer of votes from Éric Zemmour, the far-right nationalist journalist, to the camp of Marine Le Pen. Some right-wingers in the conservative Republican Party may have done the same.
On the left, the voters decided that neither the socialist Anne Hidalgo nor the green Yannick Jadot could reach the second round. So they massively changed their option to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, simply to keep a leftist in the running. This, despite the fact that many Socialists and Greens do not sympathize with this career politician.
And in the center, many of those who would normally have chosen Valérie Pécresse, the Republican candidate, did not offer their support. Why? Apparently, they feared the strength that both Le Pen and Mélenchon might have.
When having to decide between two options in the second round, a small margin can make a big difference. The perspective of a Le Pen’s second round against Mélenchon was not entirely far-fetched.
But how does this reality affect Macron’s aspirations? Here we explain it to you.
The growth of the ends
For the president, it should be a concern that the so-called “extreme forces” – his opposition parties – are getting stronger.
As veteran political commentator Alain Duhamel put it this Sunday, “the anti-system parties now have the loyalty of the majority of French people.”
If Marine Le Pen’s vote is added to that of Éric Zemmour and the third “sovereignty” candidate Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the extreme right would have 33% of the vote, seven points more than in 2017.
Similarly, if Mélenchon and the two Trotskyists are added, they easily add up to more than 50% of the voters.
Many of these people will end up voting for Macron in the second round for the same reason they did in 2017, because for them to see the extreme right in power is inconceivable. But there will be others who abstain, vote blank or show preference for Le Pen.
The anti-Le Pen vote and the anti-Macron vote now converge; the first going down and the second going up.
The effects on traditional matches
The president is not the only one who may lose sleep over this Sunday’s election. These elections also resulted in a debacle for France’s traditional parties since 1958: the conservative Republican Party and the Socialist Party.
The process to erode these groups was started by Macron five years ago, but the politician completed his mission in 2022.
The candidates of both parties, and especially the socialist Anne Hidalgo, would not reach the 5% threshold that allows them to recover electoral costs. The price to pay will be millions of euros, but the worst thing for these games is ignominy. We can expect deep internal debates.
Macron has designed it in such a way that the division in French politics is now definitely the one he was looking for: between his own “realist centrism” and “openness to the world” and the “extremism” of his opponents. Le Pen’s “nationalist extremism” and Mélenchon’s “utopian extremism”.
This division has served him very well so far. It allows him to aggregate the so-called “responsible” forces of the left and right, gutting the main opposition and keeping himself the master of the field.
Source: Elcomercio
