From the 2019 Europeans to the primary for 2022, the figures of the environmentalist dynamic

With 122,670 enrolled in the primary of Europe Ecology-Les Verts (EELV) and all the environmental forces, the objective of 100,000 citizens has been exceeded. A record relative to the two to four million registered primary of the Socialist Party or the Republicans party. During the last European and municipal elections, environmentalists had already created a surprise by establishing themselves as one of the major forces of the left. The increase in the number of activists and the influx at the last summer days of environmentalists in Poitiers show a party that is on the rise.

Unlike past primaries where EELV members represented nearly half of those registered, this year many voters are not EELV activists. It is difficult to know who will benefit from this enthusiasm.

An electoral performance in the last polls

EELV was born in 2010 from the merger of the Les Verts party with the Europe Ecology movement created for the Europeans in 2009 (the list achieved a very good score, with 16.28% of the votes cast and 2,803,759 votes). The entry into the government under the quinquennium Holland weakened the party, divided on the strategy adopted. After a slump, the environmental party achieved very good scores in the Europeans of 2019 and won eleven major cities in the municipal elections of 2020, unprecedented for the party which consolidates its territorial presence in the major cities.

The pitfall of the presidential election

EELV’s pool of votes varies greatly from one type of election to another, since the party was founded in 2010. 828,345 votes for Eva Joly in the 2012 presidential election (but 1,418,264 in the legislative elections of the same year for EELV alone), and more than 3 million votes in the Europeans in 2019 (against almost 1.7 million five years earlier). The Europeans appear, for the ecologists, as the ballot being the most favorable to them, certainly because of their functioning: a proportional and single-round election, without a strategy for maintaining the second round.

When the activists eliminate the favorite

If today Yannick Jadot appears in a favorable position to win, the previous primaries have shown how the candidate considered as the favorite could find himself eliminated sometimes in the first round, by the voters in the primary. In addition, the low number of voters explains why the results are so far removed from the polls.