The 2017 remake will take place.
After several months of campaigning during which Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen have almost always been given the lead in the polls, the two favorites in the presidential election actually qualified, on Sunday April 10, for the second round of the presidential election.
The bet is initially winning for Emmanuel Macron – the first outgoing president to come out on top (27.6% of the vote) in the first round since Jacques Chirac in 2002 – who has not ceased, since his election in 2017, to make of Marine Le Pen, his only adversary in the French political landscape.
Emmanuel Macron has been saying for five years that the old right-left divide has given way to the "progressive-nationalist" divide.
By finding himself once again opposed to the candidate of the National Rally in the second round of the presidential election, the head of state now hopes to benefit from a "republican front" to ensure his re-election.
His score in the first round was made possible by a five-year mark on the right.
After torpedoing the left in 2017, Emmanuel Macron tirelessly occupied the ground of the only party he considered a serious threat in view of 2022: Les Républicains (LR).
As he had promised during his victorious campaign five years ago, the president thus led, until the Covid-19 crisis, a neoliberal economic policy, but also took positions similar to the historic line of LR on immigration, security, pensions or secularism – which was not included in his program.
The Valérie Pécresse vote siphoned off by Emmanuel Macron
To implement such a strategy, Emmanuel Macron first attracted several figures from the right from the start of his mandate, starting with his Prime Minister, Édouard Philippe, soon followed by Bruno Le Maire or Gérald Darmanin.
Rallies which have contributed to considerably reducing the political space of the Les Républicains party, caught between La République en Marche and the National Rally (RN).
Result: Emmanuel Macron literally siphoned off, during the first round, the vote in favor of the LR candidate, Valérie Pécresse, who only obtained, five years after François Fillon's 20%, 4.7% of the vote.
A historically low score for a party whose executives did not imagine for a second finishing below the symbolic bar of 5% allowing the reimbursement of campaign expenses.
Emmanuel Macron's score finally validates the choice to operate a minimum campaign.
He officially declared himself a candidate at the last moment, held only one meeting and only made a few trips to France, preferring to take advantage of the international context of the war in Ukraine to establish his stature as head of state. and not mingle with other candidates in televised debates.
Marine Le Pen demonized by the presence of Éric Zemmour
Facing him, Marine Le Pen (23.0% of the vote) manages to hoist the extreme right for the third time under the Fifth Republic in the second round of a presidential election – after his father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2002, and herself in 2017.
The candidate for the National Rally managed to make people forget her sinking between the two rounds five years ago, succeeding in 2022 to win ahead of Jean-Luc Mélenchon (22.2%), Éric Zemmour ( 7.2%) or Valérie Pécresse (4.8%) as the only candidate able to beat Emmanuel Macron.
For this, it has paradoxically benefited from the arrival in the political landscape of Éric Zemmour, another far-right candidate.
The latter, through his outrageous remarks aimed at immigrants and Muslims, allowed Marine Le Pen to appear as a candidate with a softened and almost totally demonized image, thus attracting to her new voters who this time dared to cross the step of an RN vote.
At the same time, the most radical far-right voters, tempted by Éric Zemmour for a time, finally preferred to vote “useful” with a Marine Le Pen ballot from the first round.
The former polemicist, whose certain polls granted him around 16% of the voting intentions in February, finally obtained only 7.0% of the votes.
The latter, who said he did not believe in the victory of Marine Le Pen, "called" Sunday to vote for her.
Finally, the MP for Pas-de-Calais, thanks to a campaign carried out on the ground, everywhere in France, with meetings in small provincial towns during which she focused on the theme of purchasing power, is once again managed to better capture the popular electorate than Jean-Luc Mélenchon, his most serious rival to block his way to the second round.
The issue of Jean-Luc Mélenchon's voters
Now opens a second round campaign which should be very different from that of 2017. The polls announce a tighter result (54%-46%, according to the Ipsos-Sopra Steria estimate) between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen than five years ago.
The President of the Republic made no mistake about it, calling during his speech on Sunday evening to found beyond "differences" a "great political movement of unity and action" by saying he wanted to "reach out to anyone who wants to work for France".
A wink was even granted in the direction of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and, more particularly, of his voters, called to be the arbiters of this second round, Emmanuel Macron noting that some are positioning themselves "to block the extreme right" and saying "fully aware that it will not be worth supporting the project" he is carrying.
She is also aware of the challenge represented by the voters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Marine Le Pen also sent them a message by defending a vision of a "gathering of French people around social justice and protection, guaranteed by a fraternal framework around the millennial idea of nation", which she opposed to "the division, injustice and disorder imposed by Emmanuel Macron for the benefit of a few".
As for the leader of La France insoumise, if he did not explicitly call for a vote for Emmanuel Macron, he repeated three times: "We must not give a single vote to Marine Le Pen!"
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