Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen throw themselves into the battle for the second round on April 24 on Monday, with this time a postponement of the decisive left votes after the good score of Jean-Luc Mélenchon as well as the debacle of the PS and LR.
Because if Emmanuel Macron scored higher than in 2017 (27-28% against 23-24% for Marine Le Pen), the gap with his far-right rival promises to be tighter in the second round, with a score between 54% and 51% against 46%-49%, according to polls carried out on Sunday after the first round.
The two candidates will have to mobilize the voters while the first round, marked by four to six points more abstention than five years ago, ratifies the recomposition of the political spectrum, devoting the relegation of the two parties from government of the Fifth Republic, who achieve the worst score in their history: Valérie Pécresse (LR) around 5% of the vote, threshold for reimbursement of campaign expenses, and Anne Hidalgo (PS) with less than 2%.
Everyone will therefore try to recover the nearly 22% of voters who chose the Insoumis Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The candidate, who managed to capitalize on the useful vote on the left, clearly called on him not to vote on the far right. “We must not give a voice to Madame Le Pen!”, He repeated several times on Sunday evening.
Will Emmanuel Macron convince the voters of the ecologist Yannick Jadot (less than 5%), the communist Fabien Roussel (2/3%) or even Anne Hidalgo, who quickly called to “beat the far right ” by voting Macron?
And will right-wing sympathizers follow Ms. Pécresse’s decision to vote “in conscience for Emmanuel Macron to prevent the far right from coming to power” and “the chaos that would ensue”?
“Personally, I will not vote Emmanuel Macron in the second round”, warned the finalist of the LR primary Eric Ciotti, who does not hide his friendship for the far-right candidate Eric Zemmour, credited with 7% in the first round while he had reached up to 19% in the polls.
Emmanuel Macron has already taken most of the votes of voters on the moderate right, and “will have to go fishing for voters on the left”, underlined political scientist Pascal Perrineau on Arte on Sunday evening.
– “In contact” –
Determined not to repeat the error of 2017 and the controversy he had aroused by celebrating his “victory” at La Rotonde, the president-candidate leaves on Monday for Lepenist lands in Denain (North). After a campaign deemed too short and cautious before the first round, he will be the next day in the Grand-Est, in Mulhouse, and in Strasbourg, which voted by more than a third Mélenchon.
“There were constraints”, Emmanuel Macron justified himself on Sunday evening, citing the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and “equal speaking time between the candidates”, “but you will see that I will be morning noon and evening to convince and in contact”, he assured.
He said “to reach out to all those who want to work for France”, calling for the founding, beyond “differences”, “a great political movement of unity and action”.
For her part, Marine Le Pen has planned to meet her executives in Paris on Monday to take stock of the strategy for the second round. Before holding a press conference on Tuesday on “democracy” and the “exercise of power”.
This is not about changing a winning campaign, according to several RN executives. “What she achieved in three months can work in two weeks,” said her deputy campaign manager Jean-Philippe Tanguy recently.
Electorally, “the second round is going to be the anti-Macron” and we must not “reduce the pool of votes to LR or Eric Zemmour”, according to the acting president of RN Jordan Bardella.
Marine Le Pen also did not quote her rival Eric Zemmour on Sunday, who called to vote for her. She who aspires to become the “president of all French people” invited “all those who did not vote” for Emmanuel Macron to “join” her for the “great alternation which (la) France needs”.
Five years ago, a quarter of the electorate did not want to decide between Mr. Macron and Mrs. Le Pen, and four million French people, or nearly one in 10, preferred to vote blank or null.