Erwan Lecoeur, political scientist and sociologist, specialist in issues related to the far right and populism, estimated Tuesday, February 22 in the afternoon on franceinfo that“there is drama about the lack of sponsorship” of Marine Le Pen, who announced Tuesday morning to suspend her campaign to focus on obtaining the 500 sponsorships necessary to stand for the presidential election.
franceinfo: How to analyze Marine Le Pen’s campaign suspension?
Erwan Lecoeur: It can be analyzed in two ways. First of all, there has always been a rise in quality for the Le Pen campaigns, a staging of the lack of sponsorship, to say that this system is anti-democratic. What is a bit new is that it has a little less than in 2017, but not that much. The novelty also is that she must face competition in her camp with Eric Zemmour and other potential candidates on the right of the right. She may be trying to argue that with the arrival of Eric Zemmour, there is one too many people in the field. It does not fundamentally change the course of the campaign, she had planned anyway to refocus on the national media, she just stops her campaign on the ground. It won’t change much but in the media, it can relaunch his campaign on the theme: “Democracy is us, this system does not recognize the vote of the French”.
Are we just in the staging for you?
There is staging. This does not prevent that, this time, it may be even harder, in particular because the RN has made very bad scores in the last municipal and regional elections, it has far fewer local elected officials than in 2017. is also a question of internal management and strategy. Everything was done for the presidential election, many people complained that Marine Le Pen had not done the work for the municipal, departmental and regional elections. Somewhere, she may be paying a little for the broken pots of this lack of interest in local elections.
Is there a phenomenon of communicating vessels between sponsorships for Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour?
It’s partly communicating vessels, especially among activists and very committed people, not so much among electorates who are quite different sociologically. Among the elected officials, there were defectors from the RN to Eric Zemmour, so we can think that there are also defectors in sponsorships, since it is the elected officials who can give their sponsorships. There may also be an effect of some elected officials who no longer want to give their names, because since 2016, the list has been made public. This poses a problem for Eric Zemmour as for Marine Le Pen: the elected officials who would sponsor them would have their names displayed in public. At the moment, as there is a war of the rights, many elected officials will abstain, you never know who could be elected and resent the elected officials who sponsored the competitor.