Invited Saturday from Europe 1, the political scientist Jérôme Sainte-Marie deciphers the victory of the right to the regional ones.

According to him, record abstention prohibits seeing a real dynamic for 2022. Above all, the re-elections of Valérie Pécresse and Laurent Wauquiez could overshadow Xavier Bertrand's presidential project.

ANALYSIS

The regional elections, despite a record abstention, allowed the right to retain its seven bastions. Reelected in Hauts-de-France against the National Rally and the impressive system deployed by the presidential majority, Xavier Bertrand had conditioned his presidential candidacy on this victory. But for the political scientist Jérôme Sainte-Marie, founder of the Institute of Political Studies PollingVox, the horizon is not yet completely clear for the former Minister of Labor of Nicolas Sarkozy. As he recalled on Saturday at the microphone of

It happened this week

 on Europe 1, Valérie Pécresse and Laurent Wauquiez could come to thwart his ambitions.

The two presidential favorites, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, are presented today as the two big losers in the regional elections which have just taken place.

You agree ?

"In reality, there are three big losers. There is La République en Marche, the National Rally, but also La France insoumise. These three groups have one decisive point in common: they have no local roots and in particular no municipal anchoring I think that was very important in the fact that their voters did not come.

Is the victory of the right the symptom of a certain dynamic favorable to the Republicans?

The right is considered victorious, but this is probably an optical effect.

This is an illusion that is probably not shared by the party executives who must see what is happening.

We are in an electorate totally restricted to the most participationist categories, which are also the oldest categories.

They are generally owners, people well integrated into social life.

It is precisely the natural electorate of the right, the one that remains.

Emmanuel Macron took a lot of senior executives and the National Rally from popular categories.

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Another lesson from these regions is Xavier Bertrand's victory in Hauts-de-France.

Enough to assure him the LR nomination for the presidential election, even if he left the party?

Xavier Bertrand is undoubtedly reinforced by this election, but he has not become the natural candidate for the right.

Other right-wing regional council presidents, Valérie Pécresse in Île-de-France, or Laurent Wauquiez in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, were also very easily re-elected.

There has been a huge leap-forward bonus, for both right-wing and left-wing regional presidents.

Regional elections cannot therefore separate the various potential right-wing contenders.

However, there has been a clear ripple effect in recent days, with polls in which Xavier Bertrand is credited with 18% of voting intentions in the first round.

He is far ahead of his potential rivals on the right, but he still hasn't virtually qualified for the second round.

However, this is what is decisive.

Laurent Wauquiez, silent since the European elections, could he still come back in the game?

Laurent Wauquiez was forced out of national politics after the failed European elections of the Republicans, since the list he supported did not even reach 9% of the votes cast.

But Laurent Wauquiez has not said his last word.

It can be a solution to embody a relatively authoritarian right, relatively traditional on moral values, a right which is quite different at bottom from that of Xavier Bertrand.

But for now, these are insider nuances.

Xavier Bertrand had said that he did not want to go through a primary, but the fact that Valérie Pécresse and Laurent Wauquiez were also re-elected at the end of these regional could force him to do so.

It is quite possible that the right is resigned to organizing primaries. The primaries have had bad press since the failure of François Fillon and Benoît Hamon, both appointed by primaries on the right and on the left in 2017. But before that, four years ago, it was considered an excellent way to win then in the presidential election. Moreover, four million supporters had gone to vote in the primary of the right.

Why can it still win today? On the one hand, the leadership of LR is very weak. There is no Parisian authority in relation to the great regional barons and in relation to the main possible candidates. On the other hand, there is also no possibility of taking a poll. The credibility of the polls has been greatly undermined by what happened in the regions. As a result, the primary could be the least bad way to nominate a candidate and thus avoid the worst, which is to say that there are several right-wing candidates in 2022. "