Paris, Marseille, Strasbourg, Bayonne, Toulon, Nancy, Reims, Rennes, Nantes, Clermont-Ferrand, Valenciennes… On June 15, 250,000 people demonstrated against the far right at the call of associations, unions and left-wing parties . But can these gatherings have a real impact on the outcome of the legislative elections? For L’Express, Pierre-Guillaume Méon, professor of economics at the Free University of Brussels (ULB) and co-author, with Nicolas Lagios and Ilan Tojerow, from ULB, of a study entitled “Is Demonstrating Against the Far Right Worth it? Evidence from French Presidential Elections returns to the impact that the mobilizations organized in 2002 against the National Front (now RN) had, during the period between the two rounds opposing Jacques Chirac to Jean-Marie Le Pen. If, at the time, the demonstrations had had a “marginal” effect (without them, Jean-Marie Le Pen would have obtained 1.1 to 2.4 points more, and Jacques Chirac 2 to 4.4 points less, according to their estimates), the situation in 2024 could well turn out to be different…
Between a different voting method and a less uniformly critical media landscape of the RN, Pierre-Guillaume Méon considers it likely that in many constituencies, the scores will be close. “This is where mobilizations can prove decisive: one or two percentage points more can have a major impact on the outcome of the second round. We can even do some foresight: if the RN finds itself in the second round with a score of around 50% in the 2027 presidential election, which is possible in view of the last presidential election in 2022, everything could change in the event of anti-RN demonstrations. Interview.
L’Express: According to your study, the mobilizations against the FN organized in 2002 pushed Jean-Marie Le Pen back in the second round. How did you manage to establish the existence of a causal link between these gatherings and the outcome of the election?
Pierre-Guillaume Méon : The raw correlations can indeed be misleading: if the inhabitants of the communes which had mainly voted for the left or for Jacques Chirac in the first round had mobilized more against Jean-Marie Le Pen than those of the communes where the Lepéniste vote had been significant, we would observe in the second round a mechanically higher Jacques Chirac score in the municipalities where the mobilization had been greater, without this correlation reflecting a cause and effect link.
What helped us get around this bias was the rain! Taking into account the weather data in each municipality on the day of the mobilizations allowed us to test whether there was indeed a relationship of cause (demonstration) and effect (impact on the vote). When it rains, people tend to leave their homes less than when the weather is nice. However, bad weather does not make politics: in the municipalities where it rained, the demonstrations were less successful than in the municipalities where the weather was good without this being linked to the score of the first round or to socio-economic characteristics. economic of these municipalities.
From this random variation, and taking into account the propensity of each municipality to host demonstrations (depending on whether it was a small municipality or a regional capital, for example), we were therefore able to determine that the greater the mobilization in a municipality, the fewer voters had voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen, in favor of Jacques Chirac.
Why did the mobilizations have an impact?
One explanation lies in social pressure. Demonstrations can signal what is socially accepted or not in a given space, in this case a municipality. The more demonstrators there were, the more it signaled that voting for Jean-Marie Le Pen was not accepted. To observe the social pressure exerted, we relied on a survey, the French Electoral Panel, carried out after the second round among more than 3,000 people who were asked who they had voted for in the first and second rounds.
In municipalities where there were more demonstrators, the probability of declaring that they had voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round was less significant. As the protests took place after the first round, they could not change the vote of those surveyed. On the other hand, they could affect the vote declared to pollsters. And this is what happened: some of those surveyed did not declare their true vote in the first round when asked. They avoided revealing that they had voted for the FN. Extrapolating, we can think that the demonstrations, according to this principle, also had an impact on their vote in the second round.
But one could assume that since the vote is by secret ballot, social pressure is not exerted in the voting booth…
That’s fair, but the vote doesn’t stay secret for long. We talk about it with our friends, our colleagues. We will therefore be confronted with the gaze of others even outside of family dinners. But beyond the social pressure, the messages that were carried during the mobilizations (the slogans, the signs) were able to make us think about the impact that the measures carried by Jean-Marie Le Pen would have had if he were came to power. To ensure this, we again relied on the French Electoral Panel survey, which asked respondents whether they approved of various positions taken by Jean-Marie Le Pen. We observed that in the municipalities where the mobilization had been stronger, the people questioned said they approved less of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s positions on immigration, the defense of traditions or even France’s exit from the European Union. . This is symptomatic of a post-protest awareness.
Without these demonstrations, would the results of the second round have been radically different?
No. Jacques Chirac’s historic score cannot be explained solely by the effect of the demonstrations. His score from the first round and the postponement of moderate votes gave him a comfortable lead. However, it wasn’t just about who would win. We must remember that at the time, the prevailing discourse – as we were able to note by studying what the press said – consisted of saying that not only did Jean-Marie Le Pen have to lose, but Jacques Chirac wins with a large majority. Commentators sometimes spoke lyrically about a question of “pride” or safeguarding the “image” of France vis-à-vis foreigners…
According to our calculations, without the demonstrations, Jean-Marie Le Pen would have obtained 1.1 to 2.4 points more. And Jacques Chirac would have lost by 2 to 4.4 points. Abstention would also have been greater, from 0.17 to 5 points. In other words: the demonstrations had an impact, but at the margins. And do not alone explain the score of 82.21% of Jacques Chirac’s votes.
Should we understand that the potential effect of the demonstrations organized in view of the 2024 legislative elections will also remain on the margins?
The situation is different today. Beyond the voting method (since there are as many elections as there are constituencies during the legislative elections), the media discourse is also much less uniformly critical of the Lepéniste party than it was in 2002 – we remember from the famous front page Release sold 700,000 copies, the appeal of Robert Badinter and even the commitment of Patrick Bruel! It is therefore likely that in many constituencies the scores will be close.
This is where mobilizations can prove decisive: one or two percentage points more can have a major impact on the outcome of the second round. We can even look ahead: if the RN finds itself in the second round with a score of around 50% in the 2027 presidential election, which is possible in view of the last presidential election in 2022, everything could change in the event of demonstrations. anti-RN.
The orders of magnitude of the current mobilizations against the RN (250,000 people according to the police) are still not as important as in 2002, when a million people crowded the streets…
Absolutely. Theoretically, if there are fewer people, it is likely that the mobilization will influence fewer people. But there is also something new compared to 2002: social networks. Several studies have shown that platforms can have a major impact on voter behavior. Another thing to consider is the timeline of the protests we are seeing today. In 2002, they took place just four days before the second round. In 2024, the mobilization was held more than two weeks before the first round… This seems very far from the election to me. Many events can mitigate the potential effects of these gatherings.
In other countries, does this type of mobilization achieve, on average, its objective of reducing the influence of far-right parties?
The results are mixed. Overall, we are beginning to have a body of studies which show that demonstrations manage to influence electoral results in the desired direction. For example, we observed that the demonstrations against Golden Dawn in Greece pushed the party back at the polls, as did the Sardines movement in Italy concerning the Northern League. As for the “Black Lives Matter” movement following the death of George Floyd, it also benefited Democrats, but seems to be an exception in the United States as shown by a recent study by Amory Gethin, of the Paris School of Economics, and Vincent Pons of Harvard Business School. The order of magnitude of the estimated effect generally remains only a few percentage points.
However, as I said, social media can play a role. A study by Annalí Casanueva Artís, researcher at CESifo in Munich, concerning the demonstrations of the 15-M movement in Spain (Indignés movement, Editor’s note), showed for example that these mobilizations had long-term effects on the electoral level particularly through the use of social networks. Hence the interest in avoiding slippage in demonstrations against the far right, which can then be recovered and amplified by the RN via social networks.
Curiously, in 2022, Marine Le Pen’s qualification for the second round of the presidential election mobilized very few French people… Barely more than 22,800 demonstrators gathered in around thirty cities. Why you think ?
I was the first to be surprised. The most obvious answer is that the RN’s demonization strategy worked. But this does not explain why we are seeing protests today, as the legislative elections approach. One hypothesis is that in 2022, the fear that the RN would come to power was less than today or in 2002. In 2002, the breakthrough of Jean-Marie Le Pen created a surprise. It was a shock. Today, the European vote shows that the RN has a strong chance of getting a good score in the legislative elections. Clearly, there is a real risk. Conversely, in 2022, many French people who did not support Marine Le Pen could judge it unlikely that she would win the second round – the polls had quickly shown that the gap between Emmanuel Macron and her was widening.
.