Presidential elections in France, round 2

See a review of round 1 here.

Macron won.

Data

Macron (LREM): 58.54%

Le Pen (RN): 41.46%

Counting abstention, blank (empty envelope) and null (non-compliant) votes provides a better view:

Macron: 38.52%

Abstention: 28.01%

Le Pen: 27.28%

Blanks and nulls: 6.19%

This is the lowest participation in the second round of a presidential election since 1969.

Interlude shenanigans

Call for votes on the left

Dazzling everyone by their political acuity, the PS (actually center-right), EELV (ecological center-left) and PCF (cringe-left) instantly called to vote for Macron so he did not have to even pretend caring for the demands of the left voters.

LFI (left) and the far-left parties did not call to vote for Macron but mostly to not give a vote to Le Pen, i.e. vote Macron or do not vote or put an angry poem in the ballot.

Call for votes on the right

Zemmour (far-right) instantly called to vote for Le Pen, after mocking the idiots on the left for the immediacy of their call to vote for Macron.

Pécresse of LR (mostly-far-right-at-this-point) called to vote for Macron — I just checked because I didn't know, everyone was too busy laughing at her asking for donations while members of her own party said they won't give her a penny.

More analysis of the voters

Who everyone voted for

The far-right voted mostly for Le Pen, macronists voted for Macron. But what happened elsewhere? It was interesting to see that, right after the 1st round, surveyed Mélenchon voters were evenly split between voting for Macron, voting for Le Pen and not voting (or voting blank/null). This is not very surprising because votes for Mélenchon have been votes for his program but also votes against Macron for people without the usual right-wing tendencies.

After a while though, many Mélenchon voters who decided to vote for Le Pen went back and either did not vote or very reluctantly voted for Macron. But large chunks of the population, like the Yellow Vests or even a part of the Muslim community, explained that it was simply impossible for them to give their voice to Macron even with Le Pen on the other side. This is perfectly understandable, can you see yourself asking a protester who lost one hand due to police grenades to put Macron in the ballot box with their remaining hand? I can't.

On an unrelated note, you might be interested to know that roughly 80% of our police forces voted for Le Pen.

Step back on Zemmour voters

Despite being the most overtly fascist of the two far-right candidates, some analysts concluded that the Zemmour vote was actually a good bridge between LR and RN voters, stealing a part of both the lower-class, conservative catholics traditionally voting for LR and the xenophobic bourgeoisie voting for RN.

Now that it's clear they won't have enough forces alone to survive after this election, they call for a right-wing union from what remains of LR to the RN, aka the dumpster fire union. In the meantime LR is imploding because so many members are just leaving to LREM or the far-right…

Next: the legislative elections

For probably bad reasons — I did not look them up yet — our legislative elections are aligned with the presidential elections, and we will go vote again to elect our MPs in June. As everyone is angry with Macron being reelected, the battle for the parliament opened instantly, but it's mostly boring local agreements between parties so I won't cover them too much.

Finally, the left is starting to align behind LFI with discussions with the NPA, the PCF and EELV for these elections. Funnily enough, they did not really care about including the PS in these discussions, which is now asking to be included even though they should just dismantle the party and join Macron.

Anyway at this point it's really hard to predict anything about the legislative elections. Maybe Macron will keep his playmobil army, maybe some political block, at his left or his right, will be able to counter him. I don't have much hope.

And you, dece?

I voted for Macron! 🤮

When you have to choose between, as Frédéric Lordon said, a fascist and a “fascisting”, the reasonable choice would be to not choose. But as much as I hate Macron, I do not wish to see a fascist in power, so I voted to block her and that's it. There has been a lot of tactics discussed during the last two weeks: vote for Le Pen so that the people will rise against her during the legislative, vote for Le Pen because Macron will still make her rise so what's the point of delaying the inevitable, vote for Le Pen because it's the only one we haven't tried yet (this is wrong on all levels), etc. Most of these tactics are bogus.

I live in a city with a lot of Muslims and, frankly, I feared for what would happen to them if she reached the throne, e.g. she wants to forbid wearing a hidjab in public which is basically asking for civil war. That was for me the main argument for voting: despite bold claims that Le Pen would not be able to put her shit laws in place, I do not trust our institutions nor our revolutionary capabilities enough to take a chance.

If this election taught me something about myself, it's that I could not care less what I put in the ballot box, whereas I used to take pride in not voting. Mélenchon had his chances to have a left-wing program reach the second round so there was my vote. For the second round, I did not feel weird or bad voting for Macron. Who cares? He is going to feel legitimate whether he wins with a crushing advantage or by the narrowest of margins, whether abstention is gigantic or not. He acknowledges that some people voted for him only to block Le Pen and he will respect this, but he said the exact same thing in 2017 and didn't respect anything so why would it be different now? Take my vote and fuck you.

Conclusion

There will surely be some commentary to do around the legislative elections but we'll see. Honestly for now I just want to think about something else.

That said, my round 1 review brought reactions from a handful of people and I'm happy that a subjective political commentary can be well received when posted on Antenna. It might be inappropriate to push the subject too much because for some Internet people, politics are perceived as a useless source of conflict more than anything else. Well, at least no one insulted me! Also, having readers among the people I enjoy reading never ceases to amaze me, so thank you for reading, ACAB and long live Gemini! ♥