The first round of the presidential election has delivered its verdict: Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen will face each other in the second round. The outgoing president came first with 27.84% of the vote and the leader of the National Rally obtained 23.15% of the vote on Sunday April 10. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, with 21.95%, fails once again to qualify.
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Thanks to electoral data, franceinfo offers you to come back in six infographics on the main lessons of this election.
The far right reaches an all-time high
Nearly a third of voters who went to the polls on Sunday chose a far-right candidate, a record for a presidential election. Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan total 32.25% of the votes cast. In nearly 4,500 municipalities, they garnered between them more than 50% of the votes in the first round. The following gif allows you to visualize this increase and draws a geographical divide between the north-east of the country, where the extreme right is at its highest, and regions such as Île-de-France or Brittany where it is struggling to s to implant.
>> 2022 presidential results: view in one image the progress of the far right in France since 2017
Jean-Luc Mélenchon is progressing in major cities and overseas
Third in the presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon won 21.95% of the vote, i.e. 2.4 points more than in 2017. As the map shows, this increase is mainly based on the big cities: the rebellious candidate improved its score in all cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. It even progresses by more than 10 points in Strasbourg, Rennes or Paris. It is also up very sharply in the overseas departments, up to +32 points in Guadeloupe.
>> 2022 presidential results: Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate for major cities and overseas
Republicans are collapsing
In five years, the score of the Les Républicains presidential candidate has been divided by four, from 20.01% for François Fillon in 2017 to 4.78% on Sunday for Valérie Pécresse. The candidate designated for the LR congress only comes first in 37 municipalities, against 5,885 for François Fillon, resulting in a spectacular disappearance of the electoral map as shown in this gif. The traditional right seems to fade behind the three poles embodied by Emmanuel Macron, Marine le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
>> Presidential 2022: visualize the erasure of the Republicans in one image
François Fillon’s electorate partly turned to Emmanuel Macron
François Fillon’s voters in 2017 have dispersed among the other candidates this year. It was Emmanuel Macron who benefited the most from it: in the municipalities where François Fillon had obtained more than a third of the votes, the outgoing president came out on top, with more than 36%, improving his position by more than 10 points. score from 5 years ago. Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Eric Zemmour follow. The latter achieves in these municipalities a score clearly higher than its national average. Valérie Pécresse only comes in fifth position.
>> Presidential 2022: where did François Fillon’s electorate go?
Abstention came first in the first round
With 26.31%, abstention is the highest for a presidential election for 20 years. If we reduce the results of the first round to the number of people registered on the electoral lists, abstention comes first, 6 points ahead of Emmanuel Macron. Only one in five registrants slipped a ballot in the name of the outgoing president and less than 17% chose Marine Le Pen. In addition, 783,091 people voted blank or null, which represents more than the votes obtained by Anne Hidalgo (616,614) or Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (725,305) for example.
>> Presidential 2022: discover the results of the first round taking into account the abstention and the blank vote
Polls have undervalued Mélenchon and overvalued Pécresse
The latest polls published before the first round have well anticipated the Macron-Le Pen duel for the second round, but significant differences appear concerning the score of other candidates. Given an average of 17.5% by the various institutes, Jean-Luc Mélenchon finally obtained 21.95% of the vote, almost 3 points above the margin of error of the polls. Conversely, Valérie Pécresse finally obtained 4.78% of the vote, while the polls gave her around 8%, two days before the first round. The following infographic summarizes these gaps.
>> 2022 presidential results: why did the polls misjudge voting intentions for Mélenchon and Pécresse?