For a few days, Florian (the first name has been changed) hesitated. As a left-wing voter, who should you vote for in the first round of the presidential election? Yannick Jadot, his favorite candidate and representative of Europe Ecology-The Greens (EELV), or Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of insubordinate France (LFI), who had, according to the polls, much more chances of qualifying for the second round ?
“Faced with the pressure on social networks and within my entourage, I really asked myself the question”, explains Florian, then destabilized by the notion of “useful vote” in favor of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. “On Twitter, it went up in a few days. There were a lot of guilt messages towards left-wing voters who would not choose Mélenchon”, deciphers this 27-year-old Parisian, who himself voted for LFI in 2017 by ” usefulness”. “But at the time, I quickly regretted it,” he confides, disappointed that the LFI candidate does not clearly call for a blockage to the National Front.
During the following years, Florian then went from disappointment to disappointment. The famous “La République, c’est moi!”, Launched by Jean-Luc Mélenchon to a policeman who came to search his party’s premises in 2018, his positions on the Covid or on “certain international subjects” were right to the admiration of the young Parisian for the tribune. “So this year, I said to myself that for me, the useful vote for Mélenchon was no,” concludes Florian, who even posts a series of messages on Twitter on the subject. “And there, the reactions were quite violent.” Under his message, some strongly accuse him of playing the game of Emmanuel Macron, even the National Rally (RN) and Marine Le Pen.
Outside the – often anonymous – sphere of Twitter, Florian also received certain “guilt-inducing” text messages from those close to him after Marine Le Pen’s qualification in the second round, with “passive-aggressive turns of phrase that made me understand between the lines that it was my fault,” he explains. But the supporter of Yannick Jadot, outraged, defends himself. “It is absolutely not up to the voters of the smaller left-wing candidates to feel guilty. If Mélenchon has failed to convince, it is his fault!”
Florian goes even further in his analysis. “In this case, Jadot could also have pointed the finger at the voters of Hidalgo, who herself could have accused those of Mélenchon, also taken to task by those of Roussel … And we are not getting out of it. doesn’t work like that, the voters don’t belong to the candidates.”
“Lack of respect for everyone’s choice”
After voting for Nathalie Arthaud (Worker’s Struggle, LO), Philippe Poutou (New Anti-Capitalist Party, NPA), Anne Hidalgo (Socialist Party, PS), Yannick Jadot or Fabien Roussel (French Communist Party, PCF), many activists defend themselves against such accusations. “If Marine Le Pen passes, it’s the fault of the voters of the RN, not those of Jadot”, argues Léa, who voted for the candidate EELV. At 31, the young woman wanted to vote for her ecological convictions, without “thinking about strategy” from the first round and without forcing herself to vote for an LFI candidate, some of whose proposals made her “uncomfortable.
“I understand that it’s frustrating for Mélenchon, but it’s the electoral game. I never said to myself that I had made the wrong choice”, she guarantees. After having also voted for Yannick Jadot, Grégoire said he was “annoyed” by the accusations of “treason” from certain left-wing voters. “I understand the logic of the barrage on the far right, but not all left-wing voters wanted to see Mélenchon in the second round either! The real problem is not that we voted elsewhere It’s that he didn’t succeed in seducing us,” he says.
Elector of Philippe Poutou, Emile, he questions the very concept of “useful vote”. “I find this principle delicate: would that mean that all the other candidates were useless? It’s degrading for the activists”, he accuses, recalling that such a classification at the end of the first round is “normal” . “Every five years, it’s the same: LO, the PCF or the NPA show up, win a few percentages. They have the right to have their voices and their activists.”
An argument largely supported by Michèle, lucky voter of Fabien Roussel. “The first round aims to choose its candidate, the one who carries our values. If from the first estimates, the voters go to the candidate who has the best chances, the first round loses all its objective and it is the polls that guide the election. It’s not democratic,” she said.
Since Sunday, the activist has called the insults suffered by left-wing voters a “lack of respect for everyone’s choice and for democracy”. “Elections are not an arithmetic contest. Democracy wants the result of the ballot box to be accepted. Victory and defeat must be accepted,” reacts Michèle, recalling that one of the goals of an electoral campaign is precisely “to convince the abstainers”. “If the candidate did not achieve the expected score, it must be analyzed in order to understand why the voters were not convinced. Accusing others is not a responsible attitude”, she affirms, specifying in passing that “LFI achieved a score that could never have been achieved without the other left-wing voters”.