25/04/2022
FRENCH PRESIDENT EMMANUEL MACRON WINS RE-ELECTION: a victory with deep challenges
Mathias Bernard, Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA)
Published: April 24, 2022 11.21pm CEST
Emmanuel Macron’s decisive victory over Marine Le Pen in the second round of France’s presidential election on 24 April 2022 is no surprise. For more than a year, opinion polls had been predicting it. As early as April 2021, the leading polling institutes (Elabe, Harris interactive, Ifop, Ipsos) estimated the final score of the outgoing president in a range of 54 to 57% of the vote. And when it came down to the final night, Macron made it through all the campaign’s twists and came out unscathed, with 58.8% of the vote.
The success continues the theme of the first round, when Macron finished 4.5 points and 1.6 million votes ahead of Le Pen, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon just barely being eliminated for the second round – he won nearly 22% of the vote, just a single percentage point behind the far-right candidate.
With the first round behind him, Macron knew that he could count on the support of a larger number of candidates (Valerie Pécresse, Les Républicains; Yannick Jadot, Europe Ecologie–Les Verts; Fabien Roussel, Parti Communiste; and Anne Hidalgo, Parti Socialiste) than Le Pen, who was endorsed only by the two other far-right candidates (Eric Zemmour and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan).
While Mélenchon did not call for his supporters to cast votes for Macron, he proclaimed that “not a single vote” should go to Marine Le Pen.for the second round – he won nearly 22% of the vote, just a single percentage point behind the far-right candidate.
With the first round behind him, Macron knew that he could count on the support of a larger number of candidates (Valerie Pécresse, Les Républicains; Yannick Jadot, Europe Ecologie–Les Verts; Fabien Roussel, Parti Communiste; and Anne Hidalgo, Parti Socialiste) than Le Pen, who was endorsed only by the two other far-right candidates (Eric Zemmour and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan).
While Mélenchon did not call for his supporters to cast votes for Macron, he proclaimed that “not a single vote” should go to Marine Le Pen.
Re-election without shared power
Emmanuel Macron thus escapes the curse of the “punishment vote” against the incumbent president that led to the defeats of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in 1981 and Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012, and also contributed to François Hollande’s decision not to stand for re-election in 2017. Macron also becomes the first president of France’s Fifth Republic to be reelected without having to share power. François Mitterrand went into the 1988 elections with the centre-right Jacques Chirac as prime minister. The situation was reversed from 1997 to 2002, after then-president Chirac made the error of calling elections early and ended up with Lionel Jospin of the Parti Socialiste as his prime minister.
Macron’s win appears to vindicate his 2017 strategy in which he cast himself as the “progressive” champion of pro-European liberals of the right and the left against the “nationalist populists” gathered around Marine Le Pen. In the past five years, Macron’s words and actions have sought to consolidate the bipolarisation that had ensured his success in the second round of the 2017 presidential election and appeared to be the key to a second term.
An imperfect strategy
The strategy worked, but only imperfectly. Indeed, the French political landscape is now structured around three poles rather than two. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s score was the first round’s biggest surprise, as was his capacity to bring together left-wing voters hostile to Macron’s liberalism. This was most overlooked by Macron himself, who concentrated on capturing the electorate of the traditional right.
During the two-week period between the two rounds, the question of what left-wing voters would – or wouldn’t – do was crucial, with the two finalists both seeking to attract those who voted for Mélenchon. Marine Le Pen pushed her “social-populist strategy” while seeking to minimise her party’s deep ties to Russia. Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, declared that he would make the environment the top priority of his goverment. Neither succeeded in fully convincing voters nor did the balance of power really shift.
