For the first time in its history, the first French private channel, TF1, will not organize a big election evening after the announcement of the results of the first round of the presidential election on April 10: a perfect illustration of the disinterest caused by a dismal election campaign, overshadowed by the war in Ukraine.
While the queen election in France still arouses analyzes and great debates until late in the evening, TF1 will broadcast, an hour and a half after the results, a cult comedy from the 1990s, Visitors. The channel justifies this choice by the fact that “the tastes and expectations of viewers have changed” due to “the multiplication of the offer” of debates and comments on the news channels.
With less than two weeks to go before the first round, the campaign, which has never really taken off, is unfolding amid worrying indifference, which has many analysts worried about the state of the democratic debate.
The current president, Emmanuel Macron, entered the arena very late, facing eleven rivals wearing the colors of a split left, a struggling right and a divided extreme right. He refused any debate with his competitors before the first round.
His favorite status (28% of voting intentions in the first round, against 21% for the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen) removes the suspense from the ballot, even if surprises are never to be excluded, remind the pollsters.
According to a study by the BVA firm published on Friday, 75% of voters intend to vote, slightly less than in 2017, when abstention was already very high.
“It’s true, we risk having a drop in participation in the presidential election for different reasons: the destruction of the parties on the one hand and the evidence that Macron will win on the other”, explains for the Agence France-Presse Gérard Grunberg, political scientist and research director emeritus at the National Center for Scientific Research.
“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”, underlines-t- he.
Last Crucial Days
In a France exhausted by two years of pandemic and very worried about the conflict in Ukraine, the election seems to have passed into the background.
Especially since the Macron-Le Pen match in the second round of 2017 seems set to be repeated, the far-right candidate arriving behind the president in the voting intentions, even if the radical left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon (currently credited with 14% of the vote) is on the way up.
During a meeting on Sunday in Marseille (south-east), Mr. Mélenchon, who had narrowly missed the march of the second round in 2017, warned the population against “a second round low-cost between Mr. Macron and Mr.me The pen. “I hear those who say ‘It’s all the same, we’re not going to vote’, well think about it, damn it! he exclaimed, urging leftist voters, represented by a myriad of candidates, to “vote efficiently.”
On the right, candidate Valérie Pécresse, who fluctuates between 10% and 11% in voting intentions, is trying to relaunch a bogged down campaign and still has hope of proving “the scenario written in advance” of a second round Macron-Le Pen.
Four out of ten voters are still unsure of the ballot they will put in the ballot box.
According to BVA’s Opinion Director, Adélaïde Zulfikarpasic, “perhaps everything will be played out in the next two weeks”. “I dare to hope that there will be an acceleration, that the hesitant will start reading the programs, comparing them,” she adds.
In an editorial, the daily The world denounced a “dangerous apathy” in relation to democratic debate in a dangerous period, marked by climate change, inflation, the war in Ukraine…
“When I see this level of interest in the campaign so low, with a quarter of French people who could change their minds, when I see this plate tectonics in the electoral offer… things can change” in the last two weeks , estimated at the beginning of the week the political scientist Frédéric Dabi on Public Senate television.