The die is cast. On this last day of the campaign, the two contenders for the French presidency ended their journey between the two rounds by returning to “their” lands, in the municipalities where they had come out on top in the first round.
While the most recent polls predict him a comfortable victory, with perhaps even 57% of the vote, Emmanuel Macron went to Figeac, a small industrial town where, 40 years earlier, François Mitterrand had come to campaign. Normal, when he courts the electorate on the left, in particular that of the candidate of the radical left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who came third on April 10.
When addressing the crowd, the president found himself in front of a banner that was hostile to him, saying that, “when everything is private, we will be deprived of everything”. The reply was not long in coming: “Congratulations on being in a democracy. I hope it can continue, because on April 24, if not, it will be another choice. »
In recent days, the tone has gone up a notch. Like Justin Trudeau ten years ago, the president even put on boxing gloves during a trip to Seine-Saint-Denis. He especially strived to “re-demonize”, as they say in the French media, his opponent Marine Le Pen, whom he accuses of “advancing masked”. “The fundamentals of the far right are there,” he said earlier. “Madame Le Pen is the heiress of a father, of a party and of an ideology which was also based on a great deal of anti-Semitism. “An accusation that we had not heard for a long time.
At the other end of France, the tone was not the same. The choice “is simple” on Sunday: “It’s Macron or France”, declared Marine Le Pen in the small market of Étaples, in her lands in Pas-de-Calais. For two days, the president of the National Rally (RN) has also been more pugnacious after a televised debate from which she emerged unscathed, but without having been on the offensive.
Earlier, on Europe 1 and CNews, she had castigated a candidate descended from “Olympus” who “does not like the French”. According to her, Emmanuel Macron “has never ceased to despise them, to insult them, to treat them with brutality. His entire five-year term has been a succession of humiliating sentences for the French. “Visiting a hospital in Berck, she hammered that with the postponement of retirement from 62 to 65 years old that Emmanuel Macron proposes, the French will “take it for life”. “A young person who enters the labor market at 18 will therefore have to work 47 years before being able to receive a full pension”, she underlined.
Record abstention?
In this election where everything seems to be played and where the president has only campaigned at the last minute, it is not surprising that the televised debate last Wednesday recorded the worst audience (15.6 million) since these debates exist (1974). The fall is 50% compared to the 1980s.
Faced with a ballot without much suspense, the experts are expecting record abstention. Up in the first round, with 26.31% of registrants, it could approach 30% next Sunday. A new phenomenon appeared in 2017, since until then abstention had always been weaker in the second round. The call for a “dam” vote against the far right could in particular explain this disinterest.
Even if the candidates repeat to satiety that “nothing is decided”, as did yesterday Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, most analysts believe on the contrary that, for the most part, the betting is done. According to Le Figaro, the comparisons with the surprise votes in favor of Donald Trump and the British Brexit, mentioned by name by the outgoing president in an interview on BFM-TV, do not hold water. The time is indeed over when the polls underestimated the vote in favor of the RN. It was even overestimated during the last regional elections.
If the abstention could be important on the left, which would harm Emmanuel Macron, according to the pollsters, it would also have progressed among the supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon who planned to refer to Le Pen, and even among those who voted for the candidate of the nationalist right Éric Zemmour (Reconquest) in the first round.
“If the dynamic of this inter-round does not seem to benefit Marine Le Pen, it is also because the candidate of the National Rally, unlike Donald Trump and the supporters of “Leave”, remains very largely shunned by the establishment”, writes Paul Sugy in Le Figaro.
“Editorial offensive”
Moreover, the French press is practically unanimous in calling for a vote for Macron. On the Radio France International website, there is talk of an “editorial offensive against Marine Le Pen”. Under the pen of its director, Jérôme Fenoglio, the daily The world took the lead in writing that “a victory for Marine Le Pen […] would open an irremediable shift of France towards a model marked by clanism, isolation and violence, without providing answers to the climatic, social and geopolitical crises”.
The Catholic newspaper The cross calls for a vote for Macron even if this, he writes, pushes him to “assume a disagreement with some of his readers”. For the communist daily Humanityif Emmanuel Macron is “the adversary”, Marine Le Pen is “the enemy”!
More nuanced, the director of the magazine Marianne, Natacha Polony, says she understands the anger aroused by “a technocracy imbued with its feeling of superiority to the point of considering that its role consists in making the people happy in spite of itself, against it”. However, she believes that the election of Marine Le Pen “would plunge France into a chaos that only nihilists and followers of the politics of the worst can wish for”.
The title of the magazine was also changed at the last minute by the intervention of the majority shareholder of the weekly, Daniel Kretinsky. Instead of the simple statement “Anger… or chaos?” », the shareholder imposed a more directive message: « Despite the anger… avoid the chaos ». Society of Editors Marianne denounced “a serious attack on the editorial independence” of the magazine.
Since Friday evening at midnight, any electoral propaganda is prohibited in France, as well as any interview in the media pending the first estimate of the results, Sunday at 8 p.m. This will not prevent, as usual, the Belgian and Swiss media, which are obviously not subject to French law, from publishing exit polls much earlier.