The electoral campaign is over, long live the electoral campaign. It will be known in a few hours who will pass to the first round of the presidential election France 2022 which will take place on Sunday 10 April in France, but Emmanuel Macron is already on the pitch to face the second one on Sunday 24.
It will not be easy for him at all, as it seemed at the beginning of this 2022 electoral round, clouded as it was by the war in Ukraine, and in which the outgoing president, overwhelmed by international commitments, has only participated in the last few weeks. Indeed, all analysts claim that you will find Marine Le Pen in front of you, as in 2017, but that this time, at least to read polls who see them glued to a few points of each other, she at 21%, he at 26,5%, the leader of the extreme right would have a few more cards to become the first president of France.
Presidential elections France 2022: Macron first but Le Pen grows
It is not clear whether the fear is real or overrated, the fact is that even Macron's supporters take it very seriously. The candidate for president five years ago had passed the first round with 24,01%, Le Pen with 21,30%. If the polls are right, Macron has increased his supporters while the leader of the former National Front remained at the same point.
But politics doesn't work like mathematics and above all votes aren't all the same, it depends on who casts them.
And that is why this time Marine Le Pen represents a problem for the outgoing president.
All the fault of the unfortunate result of the campaign Valerie Pécresse, president of the most important region of France, that of the capital, Ile de France, minister twice during Sarkozy's presidency, who took the field to reunite the moderate front and oust Macron, but finished, according to polls, at the bottom of the table .
It is in this basin that Le Pen could gather those supporters who would the difference in the second round: to return to the halls of power, from which they have been excluded for years, the former Gaullists, respectable and liberal French, could vote for it.
Zemmour's extreme right holds back but on paper he has 10%
Also because Marine Le Pen has had her make-up done again, she is no longer scary, having abandoned the most grim tools of extreme right-wing families to her traveling friend-enemy, Eric Zemmour.
It is he who is officially against Europe, against the euro, against foreigners. Marine Le Pen has silenced these issues, focusing on the life of the French and their purchasing power. Not an insignificant detail, a part of the Le Pen family will vote for Zemmour, starting with their niece Marion, who publicly abandoned her aunt for the former Figaro polemicist.
Of course, Zemmour has lost much of his initial driving force, but he continues to have a nice nest egg of voting intentions: he is in fourth place, according to polls, with more than 10%, which will certainly not be poured on Macron in the second round.
And Macron is already aiming for the second round
It is therefore understandable why the incumbent president does not want to waste even a minute: the first round is now over, now it's about winning the election.
And it is also understandable why in recent days he has tried to draw a Marine Le Pen as she was in 2017, the anti-democratic evil incarnate. By bringing together, in the controversy, both right-wing extremists, Le Pen and Zemmour, arguing that they are two sides of the same coin. Recalling, for example, that it is true that you are no longer talking about leaving the euro and the European Union, but that the anti-European axis exists between the two of them and that if they were in government they would implement that project: "It would be a" Frexit sweet" he repeated - but Frexit would always be, that is the ruin for small savers".
Presidential elections France 2022: on the left Mélenchon chases
Even on the left Macron must defend himself, and not against the socialists (Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris), the communists (Fabien Roussel, head of the PCF), or the Greens (Yannick Jadot), all outside the big field, but from the insidious radical left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, France Insoumise, given third place, after Macron and Le Pen, with 16% and growing. So much so that someone – the American investment bank Goldman Sachs – bet on him and not on Le Pen for victory in the first round.
Mélenchon believes in it more than anyone and has not wasted a second of his time becoming the most present candidate in all of France, sometimes at the same time, as when from the Lille meeting he broadcast his hologram to eight other cities. A performance that confirmed him as the most technological of the candidates, as in 2017. But he also used traditional means to reach the French: six caravans of supporters, for example, left for every working-class district of the big cities with the task of spreading the his proposals. Collected in a book, 200 copies of which have already been sold, they have been translated into Braille for the blind and into “falc”, i.e. easy to read and understand, for those with difficulties.
The "Indomitable" is asking for votes especially from the left, from those disappointed by Macron and his "reforms for the rich"; but she doesn't disdain the voters tempted to vote for Le Pen because she has focused on the theme that you can't get further to the left: the impoverishment of the French. And because Le Pen represents a vicious, impoverished and pessimistic France, made up of people who could vote for either the right or the left, it's enough to be "against". Tooth bread for a radical.
Five points separate him from Le Pen and, if all the rest of the left landslide and the useful vote is triggered, the reasoning of the leader of France Insoumise takes shape. Even if the most accredited analysts, such as Brice Teinturier, managing director of the Ipsos research center, have many doubts. Mélenchon is less popular than five years ago, in 2017, in fact, he had obtained more votes in the first round than the polls give him now, 19,5%; and then, according to the answers collected, he "arouses antipathy and sometimes fear and hostility"; and is also considered less "presidential" than the other two candidates, with 27%, against 39% for Le Pen and 65% for Macron.
Ma on the left there is only him. Even if maybe it won't be enough for him to pass to the second round.
