Emmanuel Macron is the undisputed winner of the first round of the election. The good performance, above what the surveys of the last few days pointed out, is due to two phenomena.
The “flag effect”, a term the French used to describe voters’ adherence to the head of state after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With 28.4%, Macron returned to the popularity of early March, when the conflict changed the lives of Europeans. Then the useful vote, characterized by the transfer of votes from candidates from social democratic parties to centrist parties in recent days.
As in Portugal at the beginning of the year, the increasingly real threat from the extreme right seems to have altered the calculation of the moderate voter. But the main information of the first round is that the political system that ruled France for 40 years is definitively buried.
The Republicans reached a miserable 4.8% with Valerie Pécresse, while the socialist Anne Hidalgo did not exceed 2%. A last melancholy act for the parties of Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand.
The implosion of the two main parties must be taken into account when making future calculations. Second and third place, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon share a similar constituency.
The exponent of the extreme right, who will contest the second round with Macron on April 24, maintained her popular base, built up after years of implementing her nationalist agenda in post-industrial regions, and gained space on the republican right with her normalization strategy, described in the last column. Mélenchon, on the other hand, benefited from the socialist and ecological failure and improved the 2017 result (19.5%), now with 21.7% of the votes.
But Mélenchon’s electorate, which came out ahead among voters aged 18 to 34, has changed a lot in recent years. The disillusioned Socialist Party militants, which he represented for decades, gave way to the generation that plunged into politics after 2008. For many of this group, who wore short pants when the Republic rallied against Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, the priority is the fight against the predatory capitalism that they accuse Macron of embodying.
The clear victory of the current president in the first round guarantees against a democratic accident, but the election remains open. The republican front that took place in 2002 and 2017, when the Le Pens reached the second round, was not just the result of a romantic popular democratic rebellion.
It depended on the decisive leadership of the political class, on the mobilizing force of parties and unions, and on the historical memory of the French who fought fascism in the past. In a completely unstructured political system, marked by the risk of a convergence between Le Pen and Mélenchon voters, the repetition of this movement is far from guaranteed.
By repeating four times that “you must not vote for Le Pen”, the leader of Insubmissive France shows that he will live up to his historic responsibility, unlike many others.
His words were the most important of the election night. Because, for the first time, the victory of the extreme right still cannot be completely ruled out after the first round.
