The question upstream of these communication strategies could be: how to lose… the head held high? Apart from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who used his defeat as a sham springboard for the legislative elections, the other losers in the presidential election have opted for different techniques. If Yannick Jadot has chosen silence, Marine Le Pen has refocused her communication on the ground and done the minimum, while like Anne Hidalgo, Valérie Pécresse quickly found her cap as a local elected official. After a month of media diet, her first trip was to Versailles as president of the Ile-de-France region.
Laetitia Krupa : Valérie Pécresse affirms that she learned a lot and finally she does not pronounce this word of defeat. Is this word taboo when we have lost?
Gaspard Gantzer: I think he is – and it’s a shame, moreover, because listening to Valérie Pécresse, we would like to advise her on another communication strategy which would consist in simply saying: yes I lost , I am extremely disappointed and it is difficult to live. Acknowledging defeat also helps build a media image. An anecdote: the evening of her defeat, Valérie Pécresse was much mocked because she launched an appeal for donations. This framing effect was terrible for her. The same evening, Yannick Jadot did exactly the same thing, at the same time, and no one laughed at him. Maybe there was misogyny but maybe in the tone, he recognized that he had lost and asked for solidarity without taking detours to hide the reality.
This withdrawal into her function as a local elected official is a classic in politics, we think of VGE for example, or of Jacques Chirac. Is it a good strategy to bounce back?
It’s an excellent image strategy because you can show that you are at work, at work. First of all in internal communication, vis-à-vis your own troops, your collaborators and the elected officials who are around you, but also vis-à-vis the outside world: you have not remained idly weeks after the election and you can rebuild yourselves. Jacques Chirac had succeeded in doing so after his defeat in 1981 and even after his defeat in 1988 by relying on the mayor of Paris.
The big trend is to get back into the arena as quickly as possible. Example, Ségolène Royal, beaten by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, then by Martine Aubry the following year for the post of first secretary of the Socialist Party, Ségolène Royal knew how to maintain a media agenda thanks to her little phrases and her meetings, such as that of the Zénith organized two months after the Reims congress in 2008. What was Ségolène Royal’s strategy in the end? Never disappear from the media game?
Ségolène Royal is part of a generation of politicians who think that if we don’t exist on television and radio, we no longer exist and we are politically dead. She also thought, and that’s how she managed to create the surprise to be the candidate in 2007 and even to stay in the political game for a very long time, that we had to invent a style. And there, undoubtedly, we see that she had her own style, which was very popular with the people of the left at the time.
The saying goes that in politics, you are never dead. In the end, is admitting defeat a mistake?
This is what politicians think because they think that to acknowledge defeat is to create the path to oblivion or disappearance. I think times have changed. Today, women and men who observe politics know that you can win and you can lose and they like people who have scars and who have known how to lose, to bounce back and win afterwards. .
And we must, in any case, be wary of hot declarations. On the evening of their respective defeats in the 2022 presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen announced that they would not run again. Two months later, nothing is less certain.