2022 legislative poll: voting intentions, chances for the left… The full point

LEGISLATIVE SURVEY. After the re-election of Emmanuel Macron as President of the Republic, the French will have to elect their deputies on June 12 and 19, 2022. Will LREM remain in the majority? Will the left succeed in imposing cohabitation? What about the National Rally? What the polls say.

They have fueled the presidential campaign for months and have even intensified in recent weeks. Often criticized, polls on voting intentions have not failed to fuel the debate. But while the legislative elections are approaching, very little, if any, opinion poll is carried out for this ballot which should make it possible to elect, on June 12 and 19, 2022, the 577 deputies who will sit in the National Assembly. . If it is difficult for the institutes to carry out investigations because the legislative elections are actually 577 local elections, with thousands of different candidates representing the various parties, these are only global trends that can be realized (read more low).

If Emmanuel Macron and La République en Marche seem in a good position to be able to obtain the parliamentary majority again at the Bourbon Palace, the cards could however be reshuffled following the start of an alliance on the left. On Sunday May 1, 2022, La France insoumis and Europe Ecologie-Les Verts announced that they had found common ground in order to carry out a common project for the legislative elections with around a hundred constituencies reserved for ecologists. While talks continue with the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, can the left hope to weigh in the parliamentary game that will open? On the other hand, will Marine Le Pen and the National Rally manage to increase their number of seats?

What do the voting intention polls say about the 2022 legislative elections?

More than a month before the first round of the legislative elections, only two polls on voting intentions have been carried out by Cluster 17 and Harris Interactive. To succeed in establishing them, the institutes did not question respondents on the name that they will slip into the ballot box to represent their constituency but on the party to which they would grant their vote, proposing hypotheses of coalition but also of individual candidacy of each political family.

The last poll on the legislative elections was carried out from April 27 to 28 by Cluster 17, with 2,714 people. It shows that a first hypothesis of an LFI-EELV-PCF alliance would allow this political group to collect 27% of the votes cast in the first round, ahead of LREM / MoDem / Horizons (23%) and the National Rally (21%). . The Republicans would only get 9%, ahead of Reconquest (6.5%). If the Socialist Party were to join the left-wing coalition, 34% of the votes cast could be amassed in the first round by this political flank, i.e. ten points ahead of LREM / MoDem / Horizons (24%) and the Rassemblement national, allied with Reconquest (24%).

The second poll on these 2022 legislative elections came from the interactive Harris Institute on Monday, April 25 (see the full survey). Conducted online from Sunday April 24 after 8 p.m. to Monday April 25 for the magazine Challenges, the study covers a sample of 2,343 people. And its conclusions spare the suspense, leading to the same result as Cluster 17: if the different political forces launched themselves into these elections without forming an alliance, the candidates supported by La République en Marche, le Modem and Horizons would accumulate 24% of the votes cast in the 1st round, ahead of the candidates supported by the National Rally (23%) and those supported by France Insoumise (19%). 8% of voters would opt for Europe-Ecologie Les Verts, as much as for Les Républicains, 7% for the Reconquête party! of Eric Zemmour and 5% for the Socialist Party.

In the event of an alliance between France Insoumise, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party and Europe Ecologie Les Verts, the left-wing coalition would be increased to 33% of the vote. A hypothetical alliance between La République en Marche, Le Modem, Horizons, Les Républicains and the UDI would arrive at exactly the same level, also credited with 33% of the voting intentions. The National Rally, Stand up France and Reconquest! combined would be a notch below, but in a pocket handkerchief, at 31%.

What are the poll projections for the 2022 legislative elections?

Polls on legislative elections can give rise to projections of the number of seats for each political party in the National Assembly. Harris made this calculation for his April 25 survey and arrives at a range of 328 to 368 seats for the presidential majority (compared to 364 currently), or the absolute majority of the 577 seats to be filled in June. The RN would reach a record of 75 to 105 deputies against 8 today, The Republicans and the UDI would obtain between 35 and 65 elected representatives, half as many as during the previous legislature, the Insoumis 25 to 45 deputies (against 17 currently ), the socialists barely thirty.

The scenario of alliances “by bloc” would give between 326 and 366 deputies to the LREM-LR-UDI alliance, between 117 and 147 deputies for the RN-DLF-R! bloc, while the left bloc would glean between 73 and 93 deputies.

What do the polls say about Macron’s wishes for victory or defeat in the legislative elections?

Before the Harris poll, questions had been asked about the legislative elections to voters, on the sidelines of the second round of the presidential election. Several institutes have tried to gauge the “wishes for victory” or “defeat” for Emmanuel Macron in these legislative elections, but also the wishes for “majority” or even “cohabitation” for the Head of State. In an Ifop poll published on the evening of the second round of the presidential election for TF1, LCI, Paris Match and Sud Radio, voters from a sample of 4,827 people registered on the electoral lists thus indicated 68% that they wanted ‘at the end of the next legislative elections, “the oppositions represent the majority of deputies in the National Assembly and impose cohabitation on Emmanuel Macron”. 32% “only” therefore want “Emmanuel Macron to benefit from a majority of deputies in the National Assembly”.

In detail, supporters of cohabitation are unsurprisingly the most numerous among voters in the first round of Marine Le Pen (91%), ahead of voters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon (89%), Eric Zemmour (88 %), Yannick Jadot (68%) and Valérie Pécresse (67%). They are all the same 17% among the voters of Emmanuel Macron himself (read the complete study on the Ifop website).

A defeat of Emanuel Macron or a cohabitation mostly desired

Two other surveys also lean very clearly towards cohabitation for this second five-year term of Emmanuel Macron. The first one, conducted by OpinionWay for Cnews and Europe 1, indicates that 63% of those polled prefer that the Head of State “does not have a majority and is forced to cohabit”, against 35% who want him “to have a majority in the National Assembly and can pursue its policy”. The detailed figures corroborate the Ifop survey: 95% of voters for Marine Le Pen, 84% of those for Eric Zemmour, 77% of voters for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 63% of those for Yannick Jadot and 55% of those of Valérie Pécresse prefer to see Macron fail in the June legislative elections. OpinionWay also surveyed its sample on the desired cohabitation Prime Minister: 46% would favor Marine Le Pen and 44% for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, while only 8% would prefer Valérie Pécresse.

Last survey of its kind published on the evening of the second round: a Ipsos Sopra-Steria survey for France TV, Le Parisien and Radio France, is more measured. But the majority (56%) of respondents also answer that they want Emmanuel Macron to lose the legislative elections, against 24% who prefer a victory to “avoid cohabitation” and 20% who want it “to apply his program”. The trends remain the same, with a few deviations, with 87% of Marine Le Pen voters in favor of a defeat, 84% of those of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 80% of those of Eric Zemmour, 49% of those of Yannick Jadot and 40% of those of Valérie Pécresse. Note: 57% of those questioned say they are in favor, during the legislative elections, of an alliance of left-wing parties (LFI, EELV, PCF and PS), including 93% of Jean-Luc Mélenchon voters and 85% from those of Yannick Jadot.

Wishes also expressed by political party in the legislative elections

The same poll by Ipsos Sopra Steria also asks the question of the legislative elections in a slightly different way by asking respondents if they want parties to emerge “strengthened” or “weakened” from the elections. A question that is still far from a voting intention, but comes slightly closer. In this little game, 39% say they want to see La France Insoumise “reinforced” after the election next June against 29% who would prefer it “weakened”, a figure comparable to that of the National Rally with 38% (against 36% ).

Behind, the balance is systematically reversed: 36% want to see Europe-Ecologie Les Verts “weakened” (against 29% “strengthened”), 38% for the Republic on the Move (against 26%), 40% for the Communist Party (against 16%), 44% for the Reconquest party! of Eric Zemmour (against 20%) and finally 47% for the Socialist Party (against 18%) tied with Les Républicains (against 15% “reinforced”). Note that a quarter to a third of respondents answer “neither one nor the other” the question.

Difficult to produce reliable polls for the legislative elections

Please note: the votes for the legislative elections will be very different from those cast for this presidential election. Other components structure this vote: the weight of the parties established in the territories, the political personalities appreciated locally, the political rapprochements at the level of the constituencies, and the method of voting, majority in two rounds. All this makes the job of pollsters difficult. But if it is impossible to make projections, certain elements must be taken into account to measure the balance of power. In the 566 metropolitan and overseas constituencies (excluding the constituencies of French nationals living abroad), Emmanuel Macron came out on top, in the first round of the presidential election, in 256. Marine Le Pen in 206, Jean -Luc Mélenchon in 104, Valérie Pécresse in… none. But remember that in 2017, Marine Le Pen managed to lead the first round of the presidential election in 216 constituencies; the far-right party had only managed to elect 9 deputies.