Jean-Luc Mélenchon knew nothing about it. He enjoyed the buzz of Twitter, his blog and Facebook to send some niceties to his internal critics. But when three young people, including Antoine Léaument, now a deputy, convince him to perform on TikTok in 2020 to support high school students who oppose Parcoursup, he says yes. The video now looks dated in the middle of the hundred he has since posted. Her favourites? The attacks mocking Emmanuel Macron, staged in music. “Making a TikTok is an art,” he even boasts from the top of his two million subscribers.
If he is passionate about the social network, it is not because this one does not come from the United States, but because it has become an essential medium for his strategy. Young people have been fleeing the ballot box for years, but TikTok has proven that it is not uninterested in politics. How not to see there the sign of an appetite? “It’s a way to convey political messages by making comic extracts. We talk about the substance in a relaxed way. It’s a more politicized place than we think, and which raises the awareness of young voters or future voters”, explains his entourage, who is convinced of having won votes under 30 in this way.
Rebellious, walkers, at LR as at PS and EELV, few are our elected officials who do not connect to TikTok. The greed, of course, to be known and recognized. Television, whose ratings are graying as much on Hanouna as on Daily, is no longer the ideal way to appeal to young people. “For my 17-year-old daughter, who enters Sciences Po, the RN is Bardella on TikTok. She does not know who Jean-Marie Le Pen is”, says a socialist leader. “It’s a generation where the media is a message, analyzes François Bayrou. The big question for French society is recognition. And when the president does a TikTok, he tells them ‘I recognize you as a generation , I take you seriously and I want to speak to you.”
Pension reform, a subject discussed
The number of users in France is estimated at nearly 15 million every month. This is equivalent to 31.25% of registered voters in the 2022 presidential election. Dizzying. In recent weeks, the conflict over pension reform has literally invaded TikTok accounts in France. We come across an American influencer reassuring her compatriots about their upcoming visits to Paris despite the strikes, and even calling on them to support the demonstrators. Mélenchon rubs his hands: over the last sixty days, the man from Nupes has garnered 30 million views on his videos.
“Conscientize” minds, of course, but there is no good recipe. Former President François Hollande, who in spite of himself has become a mocked model on TikTok, decided to register there in December, but has not published on it since. What’s the point ? Louis Boyard’s “blockade challenge”, launched on social networks to mobilize young people for the strike day of March 7, did not meet with great success.
The suspicion that hangs over the social network, accused of spying on behalf of the Chinese authorities, does not suit these politicians in search of recognition. The European Union has banned the app for security reasons, and several European governments have followed suit, demanding their elected officials and civil servants to uninstall TikTok. “There will always be a malicious use of social networks, as the Russians did with Facebook during the American campaign, recalls a close friend of Mélenchon. We do content there, not top secret meetings.” For how much longer ?