Apparently, France will again experience a ballot between the current president Emmanuel Macron and the far-right Marine Le Pen, the most voted candidates this Sunday in the first round of the presidential election. According to Ipsos projections, Macron has a greater advantage than expected in the latest polls: the president collects around 28 percent of the vote, while Le Pen stands at around 23 percent, just 0.8 percent per above Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Despite the context of the vote, held after an atypical campaign marked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the candidate for re-election It improves the results achieved five years ago, when in the first round he got 24.01 of the vote, but Le Pen would also achieve better results than in 2017, when he had 21.30 percent.
Meanwhile, the left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon (with 22.2 percent of the vote, according to Ipsos in its latest update) remains at the gates of the second round that will take place on April 24. “Not a single vote should be given to Le Pen!”, after the first results are known, without explicitly calling for a vote for the current president.
The far-right Éric Zemmour would also be fourth in this first round with 7 percent of the votes and did not hesitate to support Le Pen for the second round. While the candidate of the moderate right, Valérie Pécresse, signed the worst result in the history of her party, with a result of around 5 percent. Something similar happens to the ecologist Yannick Jadot.
For his part, the ruralist Jean Lassalle reaches 3 percent of the vote, like the communist Fabien Roussel, while the socialist Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, would not reach 2 percent, according to projections, like sovereignist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan.
Finally, the two Trotskyist candidates, Philippe Poutou and Nathalie Arthaud, would remain below 1 percent.
Low involvement
Participation in the first round of the presidential elections in France it meant one of the lowest in its history, averaging an abstinence of 26 percent of the census, according to official authorities at the beginning of the count.
As reported The worldOnly in the first round election of 2002 was there less participation than this Sunday. Back then, J.acques Chirac obtained 19.88 percent of the votes, while Jean Marie Le Pen – father of the current candidate – reached the ballotage with 16.88 percent.
ballot
Shortly after the first results were known, the far-right candidate self-confirmed her pass to the second round and thanked the voters for their trust.
“Thank you to the millions of voters who put their trust in me. Sunday April 24, let us unite to seek victoryLe Pen wrote on her Twitter account. The daughter of the ultra patriarch Jean-Marie Le Pen, this is the third time that she has participated in a presidential election and the second in which she has reached the ballot.
From now on, and for the next two weeks, the two classified will have to convince the voters that he or she is the most qualified to lead France, a central country in the European Union, endowed with a nuclear bomb and with a permanent seat in the UN Security Council.
It will then be considered a clash between opposing models, and all attention will be focused on the voting slogans of the defeated candidates.
In this race, facing the definition of next April 24, a key moment will be the presidential debate that will be televised on April 20. In 2017, Le Pen came out of the “counterpoint” with Macron very badly due to her lack of preparation and mastery of the issues.
The strategies of Macron and Le Pen
Le Pen’s objective in these two weeks will be, on the one hand, to capture the vote of discomfort and discontent with a president who a part of the population sees him as an elitist and arrogant man who despises them. And on the other, to strengthen an image that he has been cultivating for years and that in this campaign seems to have connected with a significant part of the electorate.
Among his campaign proposals he promises a profound reformulation of France’s relationship with the EU, an alliance with Russia and a constitutional change that would give it a free hand to apply tougher policies against immigrants and would take away the rights of foreigners living in France.
His campaign has focused not on traditional far-right issues like identity, immigration or insecurity, but on price hikes and measures to increase wages and make ends meet.
For Macron, meanwhile, the strategy these days will be to convince voters, apathetic and without the energy of 2017, toe that he has a vision for France and that his proposal is not more of the same after five years marked by social unrest and the pandemic.
He will insist that, in a context of war in Europe, he can be trusted to manage the crises of the coming years. And he will try to portray Le Pen as a candidate inexperienced in management and far-right in ideology. His access to power, the Macronists will argue, would represent a danger for France and Europe.