Almost two weeks before the first round of the French presidential election, the specter of abstention, announced once again at a record level, hovers more than ever over a sham end to the campaign which is struggling to mobilize voters.
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But election specialists differ on the seriousness of the evil and on the “victims” of the demobilizing effects of an announced victory, according to the polls, of outgoing President Emmanuel Macron.
According to a recent BVA survey of abstainers, only 71% of respondents said they intended to vote.
If this were confirmed at the polls on April 10, the level of abstention would be similar to that observed during the ballot of April 21, 2002 (28.4%), the highest level ever recorded for a first round of a presidential election. in France and much more than in 2017 (22.2%) which was already not a good vintage.
“We could say to ourselves that 70% participation is an honorable score”, but “for many citizens – think of the more than 65% of abstainers from the regional elections of 2021 – the presidential election remains the last bastion against a rupture total with the vote. It is this definitive estrangement that is worrying,” warns Céline Braconnier, professor of political science.
“It’s true, we risk having a drop in participation in the presidential election for different reasons, the destruction of parties on the one hand and the evidence that Macron will win on the other”, analyzes for the AFP political scientist Gérard Grunberg, political scientist and director of research emeritus at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
In the polls, Emmanuel Macron is the winner of the ballot with nearly 30% of the vote in the first round and the leader of the far right Marine Le Pen with 20%.
AFP
AFP
For Mr. Grunberg, it is still necessary to set aside the presidential election, queen election in France, which remains relatively preserved despite everything, and “even if the participation drops by ten points, we are still at a very high level, so we cannot not to say that the voters are completely uninterested”.
“People are more and more utilitarian, they vote when it interests them and we know that the tighter it is, the more people vote, so the announced victory of Emmanuel Macron does not mobilize”, he insists .
In a study carried out by the BVA polling institute, 40% of potential abstainers put forward “the impression that the game is over” to justify their withdrawal from the polls, tied (41%) with the idea that “The election will not change anything in their daily lives”.
This worries Emmanuel Macron’s supporters who fear a demobilization of their overconfident voters, as it is “historically, always more difficult to mobilize the electorate of the outgoing majority”, judges the pollster Bruno Jeanbart in the economic daily les Echos.
But for Gérard Grunberg, it is on the contrary the opponents of the outgoing president who have cause for concern. “It will benefit Macron even more because the Macron electorate is quite determined, especially in this period of latent war, it is the others who could say to themselves: we do not like Macron, but he will win and we do not know. not who to vote for,” he said.
The far-right candidate Marine Le Pen and that of the radical left Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose electorates are younger and more popular, therefore more threatened by the difficulty of mobilizing, have understood this well and are multiplying calls for abstainers. .
“This is one of the keys that could allow Jean-Luc Mélenchon to be in the second round, if there is strong popular participation because those who abstain are the working classes, disgusted with everything and having the impression that no answer will be given to their problems during these elections”, warned Thursday Alexis Corbière, the spokesperson for Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Reference-www.tvanouvelles.ca