Some were talking about a warm-up ten months before the presidential election.

Rather, we wake up with the impression that the engine of our democracy is running empty,

La Croix.

In many ways, this first round of the regional is full of surprises.

Except on one point: as expected, an abstention record was broken this Sunday.

No ballot, apart from a referendum, has never mobilized so little.

Barely 34% participation.

31 million French people (therefore) have chosen not to speak out.

Like any silence, this one will give rise to multiple interpretations.

Non-voters navigate between indifference, disillusionment, spite, anger and probably also - for some - fear of the virus

A democracy in very bad

,"

Liberation. This is the first observation that emerges at the end of the first round of regional and departmental. The abstention promised to be massive. It's worse: it reached a historic record that the Covid alone cannot explain.

Libé

, “

France suffers not from a demand for policy, but from an offer which leaves the voter on the side of the road.

The movement of yellow vests had highlighted this cut, which does not date from this five-year term, between citizens and politicians.

For these polls, instead of a campaign where regional and departmental issues (social aid, economic development, transport policy, etc.) would have been widely debated, the parties preferred to engage in a warm-up round of the next one. presidential.

The instrumentalisation of the theme of security by the RN, LR and the presidential majority being the worst example of this confiscation.

We would have liked, as is customary on election night, to weigh the balance of power out of the ballot box with a trebuchet. We would have liked to salute the surprise victory of the right, to whom the politico-media choir had been promising for weeks the torture of quartering, and which, in the river scores of its main leaders - Bertrand, Pécresse, Wauquiez -, suddenly found colors and, for the future, reasons for hope. We would have liked,

Le Figaro, comment on the underperformance of the RN, referred, once again, to the curse of the "glass ceiling".

We would have liked to be ironic about the fine maneuvers hatched by the strategists of the Elysee, to take his opponents in the pincers of this Macron-Le Pen duel imposed on all.

In short, we would have liked to be in politics, but the - vertiginous - abstention suspends the analysis and sounds the civic alert

La Charente Libre

when two-thirds of voters refuse to go to the polls, it is not out of democratic recklessness but because they had a clearly political message to send: we live in the same country but not in your world. So they let it be known. It is also a democratic lesson,

The Charente Libre.

Not only for the political class but also for a large part of the media which does not stop making the duel Macron - Le Pen, the only possible match of 2022. Result, the government, like the RN, are the two main defeated of the yesterday's polls.

And when politics is reduced to the chain of controversies and clicks on the networks, it should come as no surprise that an increasingly important part of the country is turning away from the desire to express itself in the urns.

Sud-Ouest

is the basic question the day after this first round.

Abstention becomes structural, he notes.

Many think that voting is useless, that nothing changes thanks to a ballot.

With the Covid, we are more in the area of ​​management (masks, beds in hospitals, etc.) than in the debate of ideas, which is specific to politics.

This is not what will make people want to vote again… The political remobilization will perhaps come, believes Ludovic Renard, in favor of debates around sustainable development or global warming.

We must hope so.

"