To the right, “Things are still very tight, against Emmanuel Macron who dominates the first round”, explains Brice Teinturier, deputy managing director of the Ipsos institute, guest of franceinfo on Saturday 8 January. According to an Ipsos Sopra-Steria survey for The Parisian-Today in France and franceinfo published the day before, Emmanuel Macron would come far ahead of the first round of the presidential election, if it took place next Sunday, in front of the candidate of the National Rally Marine Le Pen, and that of the Republicans Valérie Pécresse, elbow-to -elbow.
franceinfo: Emmanuel Macron wants to “piss off” the unvaccinated, did he suffer in the poll?
Brice Teinturier: No, that doesn’t seem to have affected his voting intentions. It’s 26% today, it was 25% last month. We are within the margin of error but, at the very least, there is no decline after his declarations, the poll having been carried out the day after and two days after his declarations. This allows him to mobilize his camp well, because we can see very clearly that compared to the 2017 vote, Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 voters again refer to him in terms of voting intentions, up to 68%. This is not at all the case with the other competitors. Only 51% of François Fillon voters in 2017 intend to vote for Valérie Pécresse. Only Marine Le Pen succeeds in mobilizing 62% of her past electorate. This declaration [sur les non-vaccinés] maintains a base which seems faithful to the head of state. Not only is Emmanuel Macron stable, even slightly up, but he is above all the other candidates. Valérie Pécresse is at 16% and Marine Le Pen at 17%.
If we look at the far right, now is there confirmation of a hollow for Eric Zemmour?
Something interesting is happening. Eric Zemmour’s decline is now continuous: 15% during the first measurement, 14% then, 12% today. We have a continuous erosion which allows Marine Le Pen, with 17% of the voting intentions, to maintain.
“The more Éric Zemmour falls, the more Marine Le Pen can potentially find a balloon of oxygen.”
Brice Teinturier, Deputy Managing Director of the Ipsos Instituteto franceinfo
Marine Le Pen is one point ahead of Valérie Pécresse, so it’s still a three-way match where we can’t say today whether it’s Valérie Pécresse or Marine Le Pen who qualifies in the second round against Emmanuel Macron. The other important lesson is that Valérie Pécresse is stable at 16% since her victory in the primary of the right. Things are still very tight in this block against Emmanuel Macron who dominates the first round.
Did you test Christiane Taubira for the first time, who has still not been declared?
We test two hypotheses. A hypothesis with Christiane Taubira, a hypothesis without Christiane Taubira, and we do it because Christiane Taubira keeps saying that she is thinking of being a candidate. We are happy to see its electoral potential. It’s quite interesting. Christiane Taubira would obtain 3% of the voting intentions and these 3%, she takes them to the detriment of other left candidates, mainly Yannick Jadot and Anne Hidalgo. So that does not change anything, it is only inside the left bloc that Christiane Taubira could possibly, if they remained candidates, be in an area despite everything below 5%.
You don’t see any momentum on the left?
The left bloc remains strictly stable and at a low level: 26.5% of the vote. So there is no strong movement inside this block. All we can see is that Jean-Luc Mélenchon is ahead of the others, at 9%, ahead of Yannick Jadot at 8%, and this for several weeks. These are not decisive advantages, but there is nevertheless a small leadership from Jean-Luc Mélenchon compared to the other candidates.
franceinfo would like to point out that a poll is not a prediction, but a photograph of public opinion at a given moment. A survey is necessarily accompanied by a margin of error, also called “margin of uncertainty” or “confidence interval”. The smaller the sample, the more the margin of error increases. For more details, here is everything you need to know to decipher the polls.