Jean-Luc Mélenchon, youth candidate. Marine Le Pen, favorite of 35-59 year olds. And Emmanuel Macron? Acclaimed by seniors, notes the British weekly The Spectator. “The only age group in which the incumbent president has come out on top, by far, is the over 65s.develops the journalist Gavin Mortimer. And cis unhealthy for democracy.” The electors “whose working life is over, whose pensions are — in general — generous and who have no more loans to repay are satisfied with the status quo. We are talking here about the generation of the sixty-eighters*. Half a century ago they were radical and revolutionary, but in their old age they are infatuated with the ‘president of the rich’”.
Journalist John Lichfield, who has been living in France for a long time, offers a diametrically opposed interpretation of the demographic data on the news site The Local. “Hip hip hip hooray, old people like me prevented a lose-lose duel for France between Mélenchon and Le Penwelcomes the Briton. This legion with gray temples should also allow him to win. And it’s a paradox, he says. “Macron is supposed to be the candidate of a modern France, confident in the future and prosperous.” But the centrist “was rejected by the voters who represent the future of the country”. Quite the opposite of Brexit, in short, “given that at the time it was the seniors who embodied the vote to break” and young people that of continuity within the EU.
Certainly, continues Gavin Mortimer, “many pensioners did not vote for Macron, but rather were former workers, which reinforces the fault line observed in recent years in France between the haves and the have-nots”. A cleavage that became evident at the time of the revolt of the “yellow vests” of 2018-2019, he recalls.
“The movement has united men and women who would once have described themselves as socialist or right-wing but now define themselves as ‘The Forgotten’.”
The winner of the second round “will therefore preside over a deeply divided country”, concludes Gavin Mortimer. Not between extremist Islamists and others, “as a group of generals erroneously claimed last year in an open letter, but between the globalists and those whom Macron called refractory Gauls.” In a word, “between the privileged and the despised proles”.
*In french in the text.