French election weekly: Zemmour and Mélenchon fail to understand new political divide & which voters must Macron and Le Pen convince in the 2nd round?

Many on the left will now feel dissuaded from voting in the second round.

It appears groundhog day has struck in France. The second presidential round will once again be contested by Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen- a repeat of the 2017 election. On that occasion, the self-proclaimed liberal centrist swept his opponent away with 66% of the vote. Today’s polls, however, suggest that this year’s contest will be a much tighter affair with current polling average giving the incumbent president a very narrow 53-47% lead.

Having received just 50% of the first-round vote between them, both Macron and Le Pen now have the task of convincing the other half of the electorate that they are the lesser of two evils. Whilst the majority of Greens, Socialists and Republicans will most likely back Macron in the second round, it is safe to say that most Zemmour and Nicholas Dupont-Aignan voters will come out in support of Madame Le Pen. One must note, however, that these two blocs only represent a mere 10% of the first-round vote respectively. The two qualified candidates will thus be vying for Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing bloc which outperformed the polls with an impressive 22% of the vote in the first round- just over 1% away from reaching the second round.

Much like Jeremy Corbyn, Mélenchon abandoned his successful 2017 left-wing populist platform in favour of woke student politics, believing that he only needed to tap into the 6% Socialist vote to get him over the line in 2022. Mélenchon thus deserted his staunch euroscepticism, his economic protectionism and his belief in French republican assimilation in favour of handing out citizenship to whomever entered the country, organising meaningless marches against Islamophobia and becoming publicly obsessed with LGBT politics.

Evidently, Mélenchon failed to study his electorate from the previous election. Indeed, an investigation found that over 60% of 2017 Jean-Luc Mélenchon voters had Marine Le Pen as their second-choice candidate. Whilst the majority tended to be abstentionists, one will also find that a large part of Mélenchon’s 2017 electorate was either involved or sympathetic towards the Gilet Jaunes movement- a group which was largely economically left-wing by demanding higher wages, protecting the welfare state and increased public spending, but also patriotic through waving French flags at every protest, supporting the nation state and rejecting the EU’s open border policy.

Interestingly, the two candidates that have qualified for the second round are those that have understood that the old left-right divide has been made redundant and been replaced by a globalist-nationalist divide- something Le Pen herself has stated. The two big candidates who did not qualify, however, were still stuck in the old left-right cleavage. Indeed, despite all the hype surrounding him, Eric Zemmour failed to replicate Donald Trump’s 2016 victory and instead opted for a Sarkozy-esque old school right-wing campaign with little more than immigrant-bashing and a rather watered-down liberal economic programme- often neglecting important issues such as the rising cost of living and consumer purchasing power. Exploring the Zemmour vote, we find that there is little to no correlation with that of Le Pen’s in 2017. According to Ipsos researcher Mathieu Gallard, Zemmour failed to break through the 5% barrier in the former industrial powerhouse of the North-East region of France- an area which voted around 40% in favour of Le Pen in 2017. In fact, Zemmour’s electorate tends to mirror that of 2017 Republican candidate Francois Fillon, performing most strongly in wealthier regions of Paris.

Whilst many may argue that Mélenchon’s 2% vote increase may indicate a success story, it is more likely that his party will replicate the fate of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. Certainly, one must consider the tactical voting which took place on the day of the election itself. Delving more deeply into the Mélenchon vote, one would find that whilst 83% of the left-wing candidate’s electorate voted for him “with conviction” in 2017, only 49% did so in 2022. Without the help of the useful vote to avoid a Macron-Le Pen second round, Mélenchon would have been left with just 11% of the first-round vote. Much like Labour in 2017, Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise will be filled with false hope from their near victory before completely capitulating with the loss of their core base of working-class voters to Le Pen (who already leads Mélenchon by 13 points in this category) or abstention. Expect the left-wing party to lose the majority of their 17 National Assembly seats won in 2017 in June’s upcoming legislative elections.

Mélenchon’s 2022 electorate, which Macron and Le Pen must now persuade, is a coalition of what some may label ‘the France of tomorrow’. Indeed, Mélenchon’s bloc is made up of young people (34% of those aged 18-34), those of high diploma (26% of those with Bac +3 qualifications or more), ethnic minorities (69% of France’s Muslim population), and popular neighbourhoods (achieving over 50% in almost every one of Paris’ poorer and immigrant-dominated suburbs). Overall, Mélenchon’s electorate is an eye-watering 94% urban based- highlighting a disconnection from the rural-dominated Gilet Jaunes.

Exploring the data, Macron’s vote has unsurprisingly moved rightwards since his 2017 election. Having firstly had a strong(ish) correlation with Socialist president Francois Hollande’s 2012 vote, Macron’s most recent first round score now resembles that of Sarkozy’s 2012 electorate- progressing in the most historically right-wing constituencies such as Western Paris and the Vendée.

Whilst this may have helped him to oversee a slight increase in his first-round score, this shift towards the right may cost Macron in the second round. In the previous election, Macron could rely on what the French call ‘the beaver left’ to vote tactically for him and ‘build a barrage’ against the far-right. Having once been touted as the poster boy of liberalism, Macron’s tenure has revealed he is anything but. After witnessing hundreds of protestors losing their eyes and hands to police brutality, draconian measures introduced to inhumanely punish the unvaccinated and a tougher stance on Islam than expected (including removing a Muslim woman from his campaign team for having worn a hijab in a campaign poster), many on the left will now feel dissuaded from voting in the second round.

Furthermore, Le Pen arguably has a more economically left-wing programme than the incumbent president. Having always been against Macron’s plans to increase the retirement age and phase out free higher education, Le Pen recently tried to appeal to the young Mélenchon voters by promising to scrap income tax on all under 30s. In fact, French politician Francois Asselineau found that whilst just 20% of Macron’s programme matched with that of Mélenchon’s, Le Pen’s policies correlated with a whopping 75% of her left-wing rival’s. As a result, Macron has spent the past week watering down and back peddling on many of his most unpopular reforms amongst the left. Having previously stated that the increase of the retirement age from 62 to 65 would come into immediate effect, Macron recently changed his policy into a progressively slow increase in the retirement age that would only apply to certain tertiary and quaternary sectors. To add insult to injury, Macron made a completely meaningless promise to rid the police of all its violent, racist, sexist, and homophobic members- just a few years after France witnessed some of its worse police brutality in decades under his reign.

Macron has a limit to what he can promise, however. Despite overseeing the phasing out of many of France’s nuclear power stations under his tenure, Macron recently performed a u-turn and announced the building of fourteen more nuclear reactors- coincidently just in time to kick start his election campaign. Having campaigned upon an anti-nuclear platform, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s voters are mostly made up of young ecologists who are ardent supporters of wind energy. The incumbent president will thus find it difficult to persuade these voters on green grounds.

With just ten days to go until the big day, expect many more embarrassing u-turns and watering down of policies to try to cater the left-wing vote. From my past experience, however, you can never satisfy these people. If you take the knee for them, they will simply ask you to lie down.