For the third time in the past five presidential elections, millions of French citizens are preparing to cast their ballots not in favour of a candidate but to keep another one out of power. So far, the anti-Le Pen vote has resulted in crushing defeats for the far right – but at the cost of rising abstention, anger and resentment.
President Emmanuel Macron will again face Marine Le Pen in a presidential run-off next Sunday, five years after he crushed the far-right candidate in a lopsided contest. Polls are pointing to a much closer race this year amid widespread dismay at a rematch voters have long said they didn’t want.
The second round of France’s marquee election is supposed to mark the apex of French democratic life – the moment when a majority of the people rally behind a vision, a platform, a man (we’re yet to have a woman). Midway through this year’s two-round contest, however, all the signs point to an increasingly unhappy democracy, even by the low standards of a famously morose and rebellious nation.
Pollsters have flagged the prospect of record abstention in the April 24 run-off, following a botched campaign and five turbulent years marked by violent protests and Covid lockdowns. Many voters say they feel arm-twisted into choosing “the lesser of two evils”, and students have taken to occupying university campuses in protest at the outcome of the election’s first round.
The widespread malaise “is not good for turnout and it’s not good for democracy”, said Tristan Haute, a political analyst at the University of Lille, whose research focuses on voter habits. “We’re likely to see a repeat of what happened in 2017, when turnout decreased in the second round and voters cast a record number of blank or spoiled ballots in protest at the choice of candidates,” he added.
France’s abstention problem
A quarter of the French electorate shunned the polls in the first round on April 10, the highest number since the political earthquake that ushered Jean-Marie Le Pen into the second round in 2002. Observers had expected even more voters to abstain after a lacklustre campaign overshadowed by the war in Ukraine and hampered by a largely absent incumbent.
An Ifop poll ahead of the first round found 80 percent of French people felt the campaign was “poor quality”. Another survey, by Ipsos-Sopra Steria, said 55 percent of respondents were “unhappy” and 37 percent downright “angry”. In the words of ruralist candidate Jean Lassalle, it was a “campagne de merde” (crap campaign).
“Given the build-up, there was almost a sigh of relief last Sunday when abstention remained below the level of 2002,” said Haute. “But what people tend to forget about that year is that turnout increased massively in the second round. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s qualification sparked an electroshock and a remobilisation of voters. That’s unlikely to happen this year.”
>> On This Day in 2002: Doomed Socialist favourite laughs off threat of Le Pen in presidential final
Until the last election in 2017, the pattern was for turnout to increase in the second round as the country split into two broad camps, largely along a left-right divide. The system worked reasonably well in what was then a bipolar system. But the rise of the far right has shattered the equilibrium.
Results from the first round signalled the emergence of three camps of roughly equal weight: a centre-right bloc gravitating around the incumbent Emmanuel Macron, a far-right bloc dominated by Le Pen, and a scattered left that tried – and narrowly failed – to prevent a rematch of 2017.
That failed attempt accounted for the late surge in support for veteran leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the higher-than-expected turnout in places where he did best, said Haute, who observed the election in the stricken northern town of Roubaix, where Mélenchon took more than 50% of the vote.
“Mélenchon drew many young, first-time voters as well as long-time abstentionists from the poorer neighbourhoods,” he said, pointing to a pattern also witnessed in the poorer, immigrant-rich suburbs of Paris. “He drew people who wanted Le Pen out of the race and who hoped immigration and identity politics would not be an obsessive theme in the run-off.”
A lack of choice
With Mélenchon now out of the race, the concern is that many of his supporters will shun the next round, feeling disenfranchised. Across France, the sense of a lack of choice is especially acute among younger voters, whose preferred candidate was the veteran leftist.
Between them, the two finalists garnered fewer than half the votes cast by those aged 18 to 35. For many young voters, the left’s absence from the second round means issues that are critical to them – such as the environment, education, women’s and minority rights – have also been shut out.
“There is clearly a disconnect between the aspirations of young voters and the political offer available in the second round,” said Haute. “Many young people feel their voices are not being heard and that their main concerns have been ignored during the campaign.”
It is not just the absence of their preferred candidates and topics that is problematic. Despite her best efforts at normalisation, and her own inroads in the youth vote, Le Pen remains an anathema to swaths of French voters, young and old. This has left many feeling they have only one option in the run-off, depriving them of the essence of democracy: choice.
Losing faith in democracy: France’s abstention problem
At the same time, Macron’s government has alienated many young woters with its rants against “woke” ideas and “Islamo-leftism” in academia. Brutal police clampdowns on protesters have also blurred the line between far right and mainstream in the eyes of some, encouraging the spread of the slogan, “Neither Le Pen, nor Macron”.
As a result, many young voters are likely to abstain on April 24, though this should not be interpreted as a lack of interest in politics, Haute cautioned.
“Young voters are no less politicised and no more individualistic than in the past, and yet they are increasingly tempted by abstentionism,” he said. “This discrepancy is explained by a yearning for different forms of political participation that are not limited to elections and the formal institutions of representative democracy.”
By protesting ahead of the run-off, Haute added, French youth are sending a signal to Macron, “warning him that they won’t lower their guard if he is re-elected”.
Presidential monarchy
Talk of breathing new life into French democracy has been a recurrent theme during Macron’s first term in office. It was at the heart of the Yellow Vest insurgency that rattled his presidency and fostered debate on democratic reform.
One of the defining features of the Yellow Vests was their attempt to reclaim politics by wresting it from the control of parties and institutions they saw as undemocratic. As Magali Della Sudda, a researcher at Sciences-Po Bordeaux, explained in a recent interview with FRANCE 24, “one can credit the movement with getting the French to show interest in their institutions and constitution – a remarkable feat in its own right”.
The promise to convene a constitutent assembly tasked with drafting a new constitution for France – and usher in a Sixth Republic to replace the current one – helped Mélenchon rally swaths of the Yellow Vest movement behind his banner. It also drew other voters who were otherwise uncomfortable with the veteran leftist’s divisive personality, but who were eager to end France’s “presidential monarchy”.
A long-time advocate of a Sixth Republic, Paul Alliès, a professor of political science at the University of Montpellier, said rising abstention and increasingly violent protests are a consequence of a dysfunctional system that invests too much power and attention on the figure of the president. The corollary of this lop-sided system, he added, is “a parliament that is totally impotent”.
https://www.vassouras.rj.gov.br/profile/assistir-sing-2-filme-2022-online-dublado-online/profile
https://www.vassouras.rj.gov.br/profile/assistir-filme-batman-2022-online-dublado-online/profile
https://www.vassouras.rj.gov.br/profile/uncharted-2022-filme-completo-online-dublado-gratis/profile
https://www.vassouras.rj.gov.br/profile/monstros-fantsticos-3-filme-completo-online-gratis/profile
https://www.vassouras.rj.gov.br/profile/assistir-jujutsu-kaisen-0-filme-2022-online-dublado-online/profile
https://www.vassouras.rj.gov.br/profile/assistir-filme-encanto-2021-online-dublado-online/profile
https://zenodo.org/communities/assister-morbius-2020-filme-dublado-online/about
https://zenodo.org/communities/assister-morbius-2020-filme-dublado-online/
https://zenodo.org/communities/assister-uncharted-2021-filme-dublado-online/about
https://zenodo.org/communities/assister-uncharted-2021-filme-dublado-online/
https://zenodo.org/communities/assister-medida-provisoria-2022-filme-dublado-online/about
https://zenodo.org/communities/assister-medida-provisoria-2022-filme-dublado-online/
https://zenodo.org/communities/assistir-animais-fantasticos-3-free-2022/
https://zenodo.org/communities/assistir-animais-fantasticos-3-free-2022/about
https://zenodo.org/communities/assister-os-caras-malvados-2022-filme-dublado-online/
https://zenodo.org/communities/assister-os-caras-malvados-2022-filme-dublado-online/about
https://zenodo.org/communities/assistir-moonfall-filme-dublado-online-gratis/
https://zenodo.org/communities/assistir-moonfall-filme-dublado-online-gratis/about
https://zenodo.org/communities/assistir-sonic-2-o-filme-dublado-online-2022/about
https://zenodo.org/communities/assistir-sonic-2-o-filme-dublado-online-2022/
https://zenodo.org/communities/assistir-x-filme-dublado-online-2022/about
https://zenodo.org/communities/assistir-x-filme-dublado-online-2022/
https://zenodo.org/communities/assistir-sonic-o-filme-2022-free/about
https://zenodo.org/communities/assistir-sonic-o-filme-2022-free/
“If left-wing voters were to abstain in significantly larger numbers than the ‘populist block’ Marine Le Pen has courted and moulded over the years,” he explained, “then we could end up with a ‘political accident’: the election of a candidate whose political and ideological DNA is incompatible with a majority of the French.”
