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The second round of the French presidential campaign has become a merciless battle between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, the two finalists in the first round, to attract the almost eight million voters who voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon , representative of France Insumisa (FI). But it is most likely that most of those voters, who voted in the first round for the leftist candidate, will abstain.
Javier Carbonell, associate professor at the Institute of Political Sciences, Scienes Po in Paris, a graduate in international relations from the London School of Economics, recalls that Mélenchon’s movement, the FI, organizes an internal consultation to decide who to vote for. “Le Pen does not appear at any time among the options” of the party, says the political scientist.
Although a third of Mélenchon’s voters could opt for the far-right candidate.
“In 2017, at the beginning of the two weeks of the second round, this percentage was around 20%, a fifth of Mélenchon voters wanted or planned to vote for Le Pen. And the final result was only 7%, almost nothing. Very few Mélenchon voters ended up voting for the far-right candidate. Macron hopes the same will happen in these elections, but it is much more complicated than five years ago, “he adds. Five years ago, candidate Macron was a political novelty.
The representative of France Insumisa came in first position in several of the main French cities: Toulouse, Lille, Strasbourg, Montpellier, Nantes, Marseille, and in the Ile-de-France Region. How much can this influence the second round?
“The Unsubmissive France has voters above all from the more popular classes, it has a type of voter that is younger, more educated, more of a student nature, concerned about environmentalism, feminism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and it has an electorate of emigrant origin. The problem is that this type of electorate is also more outside the political and economic system. They tend to abstain more. This can play against Macron because he has to mobilize an electorate that is more detached from politics,” Carbonell estimates.
“Not a vote for Le Pen”
Mélenchon asked not to give “a single vote to Le Pen”, but that does not mean that his supporters will vote for Macron. “The problem of youth is very similar to what happens to Macron with the popular classes,” judges the LSE graduate.
“Macron would need to apply a whole series of left-wing measures to attract this electorate. And for the moment he has not done it, what he has done is give interviews to more youthful media, he has made videos with youtubers and twitchers, but in reality the young people do not they respond to that. They want policies that fight against their precariousness,” he estimates.
What could change a vote in favor of Mélenchon, in the first round, over a vote in favor of Macron or Le Pen, in the second? In the first case “it is the electorate concerned about the ecological issue, the issue of feminism, anti-racism and xenophobia.” In the case of voting for Le Pen, “it is the most popular class vote. The most populist vote. That is to say, more pissed off with the elites, with the political system, with the establishment.”
The candidate of the Untamed France came in first place in different cities led by environmentalists, leaving aside the environmentalist candidate Yannick Jadot. “The more ideologized one is in terms of ecology, the more people vote for Mélenchon than for Jadot”. Mélenchon “offers a much more coherent program in many areas than Jadot, a liberal politician similar to the German liberal party, than what Mélenchon represents, a more social environmentalism.”
The FI candidate is perhaps the candidate that has grown the most in relative terms since the 2012 election, when he obtained 11% of the vote. In 2017 he reached 19.5%, and now he reached 22%. After the presidential elections, the French will be called in June to elect a new Chamber of Deputies. It remains to be seen whether Mélenchon’s power of attraction is capable of convincing other political rivals on the left and creating a coalition.
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