I would like to tell in this last column before the first round what I saw and heard during a campaign weakened by the health crisis, the war and marked by a historical disinterest on the part of our fellow citizens. Campaign that I followed, like many French people, in dotted lines, watching certain campaign events from the news channels continuously, participating in two meetings as curious people rather than as a journalist or as a sympathizer: that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in Paris and that of Emmanuel Macron at La Défense.
Let’s start with Jean-Luc Mélenchon; for his third candidacy for a presidential election, the leader of La France insoumise appeared to me clearly, as I realized by carefully observing his sympathizers during the great march for the Sixth Republic organized on March 20 in Paris, to be the default candidate of the “people of the left”. The observation was striking: the many participants gathered in the Place de la République were mainly civil servants of middle to high age, many from the provinces, the same people who were found during the processions of the big demonstrations in favor of maintaining public services or against pension reform.
“Who else would you see?”
If, around me, most people on the left will slip in a “Mélenchon” bulletin on April 10, apart from a few Roussillon seduced by the hype of the funniest communist since Georges Marchais, almost all the others will vote Macron, “because who else would you see?” Unsurprisingly, the audience that came to listen to the president-candidate represented a whole different facet of society. It was made up of senior executives from the private sector, dynamic seniors covered in their micro down jackets (a garment that is all the rage in the first class of the TGV Atlantique lines as well as among senior executives), elegant couples from Hauts-de-Seine or the neighboring capital, two departments which probably concentrate the most consultants per square meter of the national territory.
On a huge ring of hexagonal shape, the president-candidate had erected a platform with three ends, moving from one to the other over the course of a speech – as always – interminable. In this election without debate, without a real social project, without passion, he was able, in the same speech introduced by a DJ set, to have caregivers applaud, humanism, Samuel Paty, the value of work, PMA for the female couples, retirement at 65, Josephine Baker, peace, Jean-Paul Belmondo or even “the universal time savings account”. Its only declared adversary is the far right, but do its voters themselves still subscribe to this constantly replayed dramatization of progress against darkness? A phenomenon to watch for the second round, which falls in the middle of the Easter holiday period in the three zones: will there be an abstention from above, that of voters of Emmanuel Macron who will return to their secondary residence, forgetting to vote by proxy?
Bobos on the way to rightization
What about the voters of Eric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen? The distinction I draw between the electorate of the former CNews columnist and the Figaro and that of the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen intersects with a biographical observation. For a long time, I lived at a social and geographical distance from the more than 10.6 million French people who voted for the second in 2017. On the other hand, I know at least three declared voters of Eric Zemmour. In bourgeois and intellectual circles, among dashing start-ups, connected consultants and even among certain sores on the way to the right, the question of identity has undeniably made a place for itself, going far beyond its usual bed, that of the Le Pen vote.
It is, perhaps, the latter which should interest us the most: at a distance from the big cities, where the RN candidate does not waste her time holding meetings, invisible in the demonstrations, the people of Le Pen could prefer this time this is the barbecue at the polls. In any case, this is what some pollsters are predicting. In the opposite case, that of a last-minute overmobilization for a candidate who has never softened her image so much, he could well decide the outcome of the election and change the course of our collective history.