towards a record turnout for the legislative elections?

The participation rate at 12 p.m. in mainland France in the first round of the legislative elections stood at 25.90%, according to the Ministry of the Interior. Never seen since the legislative elections in 1981.

Millions of proxies and a record turnout rate at midday: the turnout rate at 12 p.m. in mainland France in the first round of the legislative elections stood at 25.90%, according to the Ministry of the Interior. This is unheard of for 43 years, since the first round of legislative elections in 1981, on June 14 that year.

At the time, the turnout was 27%, just after François Mitterrand was elected President of the Republic. At the Ministry of the Interior, the heads of the election office went to check the paper archives, since before 1997, nothing was digitized.

“This is the highest level since the 1981 legislative elections“, notes Mathieu Gallard, research director of the Ipsos – Talan polling institute. In 2022, at the same time, this figure only rose to 18.43%, when in 1997, during the last early legislative elections, it was 22.74% at noon.

Thus, the final participation should therefore be well above the 47.51% of 2022 and could even exceed the 67.9% of 1997. Overseas, where people vote much less than in mainland France, participation has also progressed and first results were published.

According to Mathieu Gallard, “We are clearly heading towards a very strong increase in participation, but the correlation between the participation rate at 12 noon and the final rate is 0.86 (which is already a lot), but between that of 5 p.m. and the final rate we rise to 0.99“.

Among the notable figures, in Paris, turnout at noon more than doubled to 25.48%, compared to 12.26% two years earlier, according to the prefecture. Turnout is highest in the southern departments of France with 34.41% in Aveyron, 33.70% in Bouches-du-Rhône, 33.61% in Gers, 32.85% in Dordogne and 32.68% in Hautes-Alpes. The lowest rates appear in the Paris region with 17.93% in Seine-Saint-Denis, 18.29% in Val-de-Marne, 18.47% in Hauts-de-Seine.

Proof of this enthusiasm, more than 2.7 million proxies have been established since June 10, according to the Ministry of the Interior, a number four times higher than that of two years ago. The French can go to the polls until 6 p.m. or 8 p.m. in large cities, when the first results of these elections likely to shake up the political landscape will emerge.