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President Emmanuel Macron won a second term, but with 58.2% of the vote. The far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, not only records the highest score in history, but also the ‘normalization’ of her political formation, although the cordon sanitaire against the candidate still exists.
The presidential election in April confirmed that France is undergoing a process of political recomposition: the divisions shown by the presidential results reflect the divisions and fractures at the territorial level.
The elections “illustrate very well what happened with the ‘Yellow Vests,'” says Aldo Rubert Echeverría, a researcher at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
What could Emmanuel Macron or any other French president have done at that time? “Realizing that there was a deep political crisis, of people who do not feel represented by the political system, and then they could have provided citizens with greater mechanisms for citizen participation”, comments the researcher.
“The results of Marine Le Pen, of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of the Untamed France, and also of the abstention are ways of showing a boredom towards President Macron and his way of leading the country in the last five years”, underlines the also assistant in political sociology.
Emmanuel Macron is the first president who has managed to validate a second term since 2000. “It is true that this crisis of representation is not only seen in the French case, it is seen further in Europe, but in the case of Macron, he will have to do in the face of his arrogance and arrogance that he has forged. He is facing a crisis or at least a fissured legitimacy. And this can be seen in the face of the different social protests that will arise in the face of his most controversial measures, such as the reform of pensions and the extension of the retirement age”, estimates Aldo Rubert Echeverría.
The presidential election was a substantial step for the extreme right. Marine Le Pen, with 41.8% of the votes, won more than 8 points in relation to the presidential election five years ago. That result was not just a product of the transfer of votes from the electorate of the other far-right candidates. But the most important thing, estimates the specialist, “is the normalization of that political current. And she appears as a candidate who is less feared, normalized, “de-demonized”, but despite this, there is still a certain fear of Le Pen’s candidacy”.
The discomfort of the French expressed at the polls
The vote in favor of Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the third most voted candidate, who received more than 21% of the votes, are the sign of a historical malaise of the French.
Is it just discomfort or an ideological evolution? “There is a bit of everything. If we look at the recomposition of the parties, the Macron bloc absorbs the classic center-right Republicans, Marine Le Pen takes hold and also normalizes and Jean-Luc Mélenchon absorbs a part of the Socialists and also collects a part of the ecological bloc. But French society is not a society that traditionally, or at least in recent years, is intolerant (…) Also the issue of purchasing power, the fact of defending the weakest. This This is also seen in the success of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s candidacy, but also in the fact that Marine Le Pen, despite her xenophobic positions, is voted for a lot because of that, and this is very evident in her most popular electorate, more working-class than also has in the preference of his vote to Marine Le Pen the issue of purchasing power at the center”.
In seven weeks, the French will return to the polls, this time to define the new National Assembly, currently dominated by representatives of La República en Marcha, Macron’s organization. Given the way the system works, it is unlikely that the opposition forces will be able to substantially change the current relationship of forces.
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