Reissue of the Macron – Le Pen duel for an open second round

As in 2017, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen will face each other on April 24 in the second round of the presidential election, with the advantage to the outgoing president, without certainty however on their vote reserves after the collapse of LR and the PS after the first round on Sunday.

While the polls gave Emmanuel Macron closely followed by Marine Le Pen, the outgoing president is credited with a better score than expected (27% to 29.5% according to estimates), ahead of the RN candidate (between 23 and 25%)

After months of an atypical campaign which mobilized little, abstention was higher than five years ago (22.23%), between 25 and 29%, according to polling institutes.

With the third place of the Insoumis Jean-Luc Mélenchon (20/21%), this election confirms the relegation of the two parties that governed France from the Fifth Republic until 2017, which achieve the worst score in their history: Valérie Pécresse (LR) around 5% of the vote and Anne Hidalgo (PS) with 2%. “The useful vote reflex has played out, it’s a personal and collective disappointment,” commented the right-wing candidate hotly.

If the scenario of a Macron / Le Pen duel was expected, the campaign between two rounds opens a range of questions on the vote transfers from which both will benefit on April 24.

Among them, what will be the choice of the millions of voters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon? Will right-wing supporters follow Ms. Pécresse’s choice to vote “in conscience for Emmanuel Macron to prevent the far right from coming to power”?

“Personally, I will not vote for Emmanuel Macron in the second round”, for his part warned Sunday evening the finalist of the primary LR Eric Ciotti.

And will the blunt spring of the Republican front to block the RN work among supporters of the ecologist Yannick Jadot (around 5%), the communist Fabien Roussel (2/3%) or even Anne Hidalgo, who quickly called for “defeating the far right” by voting Macron?

Ms. Le Pen should be able to count on the voices of far-right polemicist Eric Zemmour, who has long shaken up the campaign to the point of reshuffling the cards for the battle in the second round, before failing at 6/7% on Sunday .

Five years ago, a quarter of the electorate did not want to decide between Mr. Macron and Mrs. Le Pen, and four million French people, or nearly one in 10, preferred to vote blank or null.

On this sunny Sunday all over the country, some 48.7 million voters were called upon to decide between the 12 candidates for the Elysee Palace after a campaign hit by the Covid-19 crisis and then the war in Ukraine.

– Macron stronger than in 2017 –

For Mr. Macron, who promised during his victory in 2017 to “do everything” so that Marine Le Pen voters “no longer have any reason to vote for the extremes”, Sunday’s result is mixed. with the presence of the candidate in the second round for the second consecutive time.

After a succession of crises during his mandate, however, he improved his previous score (24.01% in 2017), a performance that only François Mitterrand had managed to achieve on the way to re-election in 1988.

Spurred on by Mrs. Le Pen on the theme of purchasing power, in a context of galloping inflation, the Head of State has raised his voice significantly in recent days against the RN candidate, claiming that she is “lying to people “, and pinning his “complacency” vis-à-vis Russia.

Marine Le Pen is also progressing compared to the first round of the 2017 election (21.3%), at the end of a campaign without much risk-taking and without noise. The candidate, who has smoothed her image a lot without undermining the radicalism of her project on immigration and institutions, was refocused by the outings of Mr. Zemmour, whose competition ultimately served her despite the doubts and defections of Winter.

But the step remains high to reach the Elysée, while her personality still arouses the concern of a majority of French people (51%) and that only 39% of them consider that she has the makings of a President of the Republic, far behind Emmanuel Macron (65%), according to the Jean-Jaurès Foundation.

This new Macron – Le Pen duel installs in any case in the national landscape a cleavage which had been attenuated during the local elections of 2020 and 2021, during which LR and PS had made resistance, and the Greens a breakthrough.

– Mélenchon must consult his base –

Now reduced to the bare minimum, the right and the left see their future seriously obstructed by this historical debacle. For these fractured formations, survival will now be at stake in the June legislative elections, before any initiatives for refoundation.

Despite his high score, close to that of 2017 (19.58%), Jean-Luc Mélenchon ultimately failed in his challenge to capitalize on the argument of useful voting against the far right to rise in the second round. For his third presidential campaign, the leader of the Insoumis has however managed to clearly take the leadership on the left.

In view of the second round, Mr. Mélenchon has already indicated that he would consult the 310,000 people who supported him online before giving instructions, which earned him criticism from his competitors, seeing in it an ambiguity in the face of the extreme right.

Among the Greens, Yannick Jadot can deplore not having been able to transpose on the national scene the successes in the municipal elections of the Greens who had won several large cities, at the end of a campaign marked by internal dissension.

Fabien Roussel, Jean Lassalle (around 3%), the sovereignist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (1/2%), the anti-capitalist candidate Philippe Poutou (around 1%) or even the leader of Lutte Ouvrière Nathalie Arthaud (less than 1%), content below 5%, will have to settle for modest reimbursements for their campaign.

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