Was Emmanuel Macron “good” or “bad” elected? The debate emerged shortly after the publication of the first estimates of the results of the second round of the presidential election, Sunday, April 24. “Mr Macron is the worst elected president of the Fifth Republic”launched Jean-Luc Mélenchon, during his speech. “It floats in an ocean of abstention, blank and void ballots”, highlighted the candidate of La France insoumise. Is this statement true? We have checked.
>> Find all the results of the second round of the presidential election
If we take into account the percentage of votes obtained by Emmanuel Macron compared to all those registered on the electoral lists, the president-candidate obtains only 38.52% of the vote. This figure thus counts the particularly high abstention from this ballot (28.01% of the vote), as well as the blank votes (4.57%) and invalid votes (1.62%), as mentioned by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
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By taking this indicator into account, Emmanuel Macron places himself among the “least well-elected” presidents of the Fifth Republic. But he is not the last. Georges Pompidou did even worse than him. In 1969, the former Prime Minister of Charles de Gaulle had to settle for 37.51% of the vote as a percentage of registered voters, in a context of very high abstention post-May 68. Apart from him, all the other presidents of the Republic obtained a higher percentage of votes than Emmanuel Macron in 2022 out of all registered voters.
Other indicators can be taken into account to determine whether Emmanuel Macron was “good” or “bad” elected. We can, for example, calculate the gap between the two finalists in the presidential election. Emmanuel Macron is, in this case, one of the most widely elected presidents of the Fifth Republic. He obtained 58.54% of the votes cast during this second round. Only Jacques Chirac had done better in 2002 against Jean-Marie Le Pen (82.21%) and Emmanuel Macron himself in 2017 against Marine Le Pen (66.1%). All the other presidents were elected (or re-elected) with a lower percentage of votes cast.
Finally, it is also possible to take into account the number of votes won by Emmanuel Macron in the second round of the presidential election, compared to his predecessors. Again, he’s pretty well off. The Head of State collected more than 18.7 million votes this year. It is much more than Jacques Chirac in 1995 (15.8 million votes) or than François Mitterand in 1981 (15.7 million votes). But this comparison suffers from a major flaw because it does not take into account the increase in the electorate over the past few decades.