Chronic. Rarely, in a presidential campaign, has the term marathon seemed so apt. Three weeks before the first round, some candidates appear already wrung out, as if they had presumed their strength or poorly measured their effort; others, on the contrary, display in the home straight an Olympic form, a self-confidence that they hope will be contagious. The curve of voting intentions has something to do with it, but it does not explain everything. An intimate process born of experience is also at work.
In 2017, the presidential election crowned the victory of a first-time candidate who was not yet in his forties and had never been elected. Emmanuel Macron’s victory under the beard of the “old world” had invalidated all the legends built around the election of Queen of the Ve Republic. Obsolete, the idea that you had to have acquired an intimate knowledge of the country and lived through wounds and bumps to hope to win.
Gone are the long journeys à la Mitterrand or à la Chirac, make way for raw ambition and renewal! Five years later, four first-time buyers – Valérie Pécresse, Anne Hidalgo, Yannick Jadot, Eric Zemmour – are trying their luck in turn, but they are struggling, either because the step was too high for them or because they misjudged the land.
Valérie Pécresse and Anne Hidalgo both thought that their status as local elected officials – one president of the Ile-de-France region, the other mayor of Paris – would de facto place them in the big leagues. They wanted to believe that their easy re-election in the municipal elections of 2020 and the regional elections of 2021 would open the Elysian horizon to them even though these polls, marked by the crisis due to Covid-19, experienced record abstentions. They have played as much as they could on their status as women to try to embody the renewal, but all these assets have proved to be of little weight in the face of the major problem they face: the shrinking of the electoral base of the two parties they represent and which once embodied alternation.
Courage in Adversity
The disappointment was immediate for the socialist candidate, faced with an implacable war of the left against a backdrop of siphoning off the social-democratic electorate by Emmanuel Macron. It was more progressive for the candidate of the Les Républicains (LR) party, who at first thought she could benefit from the momentum of the primary to devitalize the outgoing president before realizing to what extent she was a prisoner of her competitors, in the front row including Eric Ciotti.
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