voting instructions, increase in abstention, mobilization of its voters … How to explain the score of the RN?

In 2017, there were eight National Rally candidates to join the benches of the National Assembly. Sunday, they are 89 to have been elected, contradicting polls and forecasts with the election of ten times more deputies than five years ago. Deputies who have won more than half of their duels against Nupes, almost half of their duels against the presidential party, but almost no duels against Les Républicains.

Results that may have been surprising because for a long time, in legislative and presidential elections, if a far-right candidate qualified for the second round, the losers called to vote against him, regardless of the label of his opponent, in the name of the republican front. Calls that were less clear this time. On the side of the majority, the national line was that of “case by case”. In detail, according to the detail given by our colleagues from Worldout of 61 Nupes – RN duels, 16 Together candidates beaten in the first round called specifically to vote for the left-wing candidate and 16 not to give a vote to the RN.

On the left, out of 108 duels between the presidential coalition and the RN, the vast majority of eliminated Nupes candidates adopted the position “not one vote for the RN”. A position which was that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon for the second round of the presidential election and which leaves several possibilities: vote for the candidate Together, blank or null vote and abstention.

After an already historic abstention in the first round, more than half of the voters (53.77%) did not go to the polls in the second round. We looked at the abstention in the constituencies where the RN won to compare it with the abstention at the national level. Conclusion: the figures are similar, between 53 and 54% abstention in both cases. It is therefore impossible to make a link between abstention and the very good scores of the National Rally at the national level.

In fact, it seems above all that it was the reserves of votes of the National Rally that enabled him to win. Thus, in 2017, the RN candidate who had progressed the most between the two rounds had gained 24 points. They are 48 to have done it this year. In detail, 34 of the 89 elected RN deputies even doubled their score between the two rounds. Is it because RN voters remobilized in these constituencies in the second round? Because LR voters chose RN rather than Nupes or Ensemble? These questions remain unanswered for the time being.