Macron defeats Le Pen in French election, promises change. France Election 2022 | Emmanuel Macron wins new term after far-right battle.
It is no surprise that Emmanuel Macron won a decisive victory over Marine Le Pen in the second round of the French presidential election on 24 April 2022.
For more than a year, opinion polls had already predicted that Macron would win.
As of early April 2021, the major voting institutions (Elabe, Harris Interactive, Ifop, Ipsos) estimated the incumbent president's final score in the range of 54 to 57% of the vote.
And when it came to last night, Macron made it through all the turning points of the campaign and received 58.8% of the vote.
The success continued the theme of the first round, when Macron secured 4.5 points and 1.6 million votes ahead of Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon was eliminated for the second round – he won almost 22% of the vote, just a single away. -Percentage marks behind the draw candidate.
While Mélenchon did not call on his supporters to vote for Macron, he declared that "not a single vote" should go to Marine Le Pen.
re-election without shared power
Emmanuel Macron thus escaped the curse of the "penalty vote" against the incumbent president, which led to the defeats of Valérie Giscard d'Estaing in 1981 and Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012, and the decision not to run for re-election to François Hollande. also contributed. 2017. 2017.
Macron also became the first president of the Fifth Republic of France to win a re-election without a power-sharing.
François Mitterrand went with centre-right Jacques Chirac as prime minister in the 1988 elections.
The situation reversed from 1997 to 2002, when then-president Chirac made the mistake of calling elections too early and made Lionel Jospin of the Party Socialist his prime minister.
Macron's victory proves his 2017 strategy in which he presented himself as a "progressive" champion of pro-European liberals of the right and left against the "nationalist populists" gathered around Marine Le Pen.
Over the past five years, Macron's words and actions have sought to reinforce the dichotomy that had ensured his success in the second round of the 2017 presidential election and appeared to be the key to a second term.
an imperfect strategy
The strategy worked, but only imperfectly.
Indeed, the French political landscape is now structured around three poles instead of two.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon's score was the biggest surprise of the first round, as was his ability to bring together left-wing voters hostile to Macron's liberalism.
Most of this was overlooked by Macron himself, who focused on capturing the electorate of the traditional right.
During the two-week period between the two rounds, the question of what left-wing voters would - or would not - be critical of, the two finalists both sought to attract those who voted for Mélancheon.
Marine Le Pen pursued his "socio-populist strategy" by seeking to undermine his party's deepening ties with Russia.
Meanwhile, Emmanuel Macron announced that he would make the environment his government's top priority.
Neither succeeded in convincing the electorate completely nor did the balance of power really change.
French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon answers questions in Marseille on April 24.
He won about 22% of the first round of votes and asked supporters to use June's legislative elections as a 'third round'.
Christophe Simon/AFP
The results of the second round showed that Left voters did not behave in a mechanical and uniform manner.
A significant proportion were selected for Marine Le Pen, especially in rural areas and overseas departments and regions.
Later, it attracted many people who had voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round: he received almost 70% of the vote in Guadeloupe, where he had won 56% of the vote a fortnight earlier.
Nevertheless, a slightly larger fraction voted for Emmanuel Macron, especially in large cities where the social profile of Mélanchon's supporters is close to that of the current president.
refuse to choose
There are many more who refused to choose. More than 12% of voters cast a blank or unacceptable vote, compared to 2.2% in the first round.
The dieting rate was also significantly higher than in the first round of 2022 (26% versus 26.3%), and even higher than in the second round of 2017 (25.4%).
A three-way division of voters does not sit well with a two-round majority vote.
In 1969, the low proportion of votes cast in relation to the number of registered voters (63%) was already evidence of this. 2022 serves as an even bolder example, with a turnout of less than 60% - a record for a French presidential election.
So Emmanuel Macron is one of the "best elected" presidents of the Fifth Republic (behind Jacques Chirac in 2002 and himself in 2017) if we match his score with the votes cast, and the "worst elected" if we compare the percentage.
There are registered voters (barely 35%, 38% for Georges Pompidou in 1969 and 43.5% for himself in 2017).
The disintegration of the Left and a somewhat more traditional right-wing vote has forced Macron to withdraw by more than 8 points from the second round of 2017 and nearly 4 million voters.
This decline is unprecedented.
History of Presidential Elections: Valery Giscard d'Estaing in 1981 and Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012 lost 3 and 5 points respectively compared to the previous election.
A crumbling "Republican Front
"
It has less to do with the punishment vote than with the erosion of the "Republican Front" – or the French political tradition that involves putting aside political differences to prevent the far right in power.
It had a giant impact in 2002, was less effective in 2017 and only worked partially in 2022. So although Le Pen lost again, voting for a distant candidate is no longer considered unacceptable in France.
Emmanuel Macron's success, while anticipated, should not hide the two main lessons of the election.
First, the far right achieved a level never before reached in France, thanks to its strength to bring together a heterogeneous, predominantly working class electorate.
Second, the country's political landscape, now structured around three poles, is out of step with voting organization support the two general parties. These two clearance make the outcome of France's upcoming legislative elections in June all the more uncertain.
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