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French President Emmanuel Macron improved on his 2017 score in Sunday’s first round of the presidential election. But he goes into the April 24 run-off with a starkly diminished reservoir of votes in what swathes of the country have come to see as a choice of “the lesser of two evils”.
Macron trounced the far-right candidate in a lopsided contest five years ago, but polls are pointing to a much closer race this time amid widespread dismay at a match-up voters have long said they didn’t want.
Following the first round, Macron is on course to beat Le Pen by 54% to 46%, according to a projection by pollsters Ipsos-Sopra Steria for FRANCE 24. Other polls have suggested the gap could be as narrow as two percentage points. In any case, Macron is polling well below the 66% he won in 2017 against the very same opponent.
In Sunday’s first round, the incumbent president trailed Le Pen in every age category except the over-65s, who voted massively in his favour. Without their support, he wouldn’t even be in the run-off. But the inability to generate enthusiasm among younger voters is just one of Macron’s problems after five troubled years in office and a lacklustre campaign overshadowed by the war in Ukraine.
“Macron’s reservoir of votes is extremely weak,” said Martial Foucault, head of the Cevipof institute in Paris, noting that rivals from the mainstream whose supporters are most likely to rally behind him have been all but wiped off the political map.
“The scores of the Socialist Party (1.7%) and Les Républicains (4.8%) suggest many of their supporters already voted tactically in the first round. And the more ‘Macron-compatible’ among them gave their votes to the incumbent,” Foucault told…
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Source : france24
