“He decided to do without us! » Elodie, a French teacher at the Créteil academy, is convinced: Emmanuel Macron is not trying to win the vote of the 869,000 national education teachers. She judges the candidate president « arrogant » et “contemptuous” towards his profession. “He keeps implying that we are lazy, whereas during the first confinement, I worked from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day”she gets angry, echoing a sentence of the candidate during the presentation of his program, March 17 – “You have teachers who, during the Covid, were there, took care of your children, and then there are teachers, that also existed, who disappeared”he had asserted.
The 40-year-old, who testifies anonymously, like all the teachers – subject to the duty of reserve – quoted in the article, has made her decision: she will abstain in the second round of the presidential election, on April 24. “I am a state agent, I have to act in a civic manner. I am not abstaining with lightheartedness, but I want to show that I do not want the duel that we are being offered and the ultra-liberal policy that will be carried out afterwards”, she says. It was out of the question for her to watch the debate on Wednesday evening. Elodie preferred to prepare her lessons, with music in her headphones, “so as not to hear them” while her spouse was watching television.
How many teachers will make the same choice as Elodie? While they usually go to the polls willingly, going to vote is no longer self-evident for the most politicized with this second Macron-Le Pen duel. “An exasperation and a fatigue both professional and democratic cross the teaching body”notes Catherine Nave-Bekhti, Secretary General of SGEN-CFDT.
Laurent Frajerman, from the FSU observatory, notes a “high volatility” of the teaching electorate since the collapse of the Socialist Party and believes that the useful vote for Jean-Luc Mélenchon must have had full play in the first round on April 10. The professors are nevertheless more divided than it seems. During the ninth wave of the Ipsos-Sopra Steria survey, in partnership with Cevipof and the Jean Jaurès Foundation for The world of April 5 – the last available to date, concerning the teacher vote –, Jean-Luc Mélenchon was credited with 25% of the voting intentions for the first round, Emmanuel Macron with 26% and Marine Le Pen with 10%, on a sample of 714 representative teachers.
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