Experts say Emmanuel Macron presents a program that “leaves” to the right while his rival, Marine Le Pen, uses leftist elements, although when it comes to containing inflation, for example, he is resorting to old neoliberal prescriptions associated with the far right. -the ward.
Today it will be known if the trickery in the attempt to win the French presidency pays off, and who, after both, had the most votes in the first round, despite the few percentages that were far from an absolute majority: 27.8 percent is still president of France and 23.1 percent Le Pen in what is, after all, a historic vote for the French right.
More “won” the abstention percentage, which was 25 percent, an increase of three percentage points from the 2017 election, in a repeat of the absence that clearly expresses the lack of credibility. The number of voters reached 1,824,169 voters who did not support any of the 12 candidates submitted, and the absentees must add 543,609 blank votes and 247,151 invalid votes.
In this way, the bloc that did not speak out is 27 percent, which is higher than that of the candidate with the most votes.
Today it is certain that a large number of poor people or people who feel discriminated against permanently abstain from voting.
And there is disappointment, above all, among the youth in the face of this second round, because they will once again have to choose between what they consider the “lesser of two evils”, something that already happened in the 2017 poll, when the presidency was also contested in the tie-breaking round. The same competitors.
“We are tired of always having to vote for the less bad of the two, and that explains this revolution. “Neither Macron nor Le Pen,” a student from the Sorbonne University told Reuters during a demonstration at the university’s gates, a few days ago, to demand that neither Macron nor Le Pen be voted on.
These students were to vote in the first round for the left-wing candidate Mélenchon. But they can refrain now.
Experts also considered the effect of the so-called “useful vote” in the first round, the effect that the voter deposited not in favor of the candidate of his true sympathy, but on the candidate of the party they consider with the most odds of winning, which is usual in French elections.
The online consultation carried out after the first round by the Mieux Voter Association, in its desire to promote a voting system that balances the intent to vote and at the same time the qualifications that persons confer on the candidate, proves a useful voting weight.
According to france24.com, when counseling participants were asked to express themselves according to the traditional system, as well as to rate each candidate on a scale that goes from excellent to disapproved – what the institution promotes as a “majority vote” – it turned out that Jean-Luc Melenchon, who He came third in the first round with 22 percent of the votes, receiving 55.46 percent of the points out of 30,000 participants. Macron followed with 14.38 percent.
It is unknown how influential this perception of who will be today’s winner will be to determine which of the finalists will take the cat to the water.
Opinion polls show a range of 51 percent to 54 percent in favor of Macron, against a spectrum between 49 percent and 46 percent for Le Pen.
One and the other sought at all costs to win the votes deposited in the first round in favor of the remaining ten candidates; Mainly, Mélenchon (uncompromised France), third on the first-round roster with 22 percent. The fate of his followers’ vote is critical today.
Recent polls show that 38 percent of the votes cast for him will now go to Macron, and 16 percent to Le Pen.
But that won’t mean more security for the president as he looks to be re-elected.
considered by a kind of intruder Upon coming to the presidency in 2017 and presenting himself as an “anti-system” figure within the regime, the president’s performance during the period ending in those who expected more consistent positions from an accusing task, on the contrary, from the right wing, was not satisfied.
However, analysts point in his favour, he has cut unemployment from the 9.6 percent he found when he came to power to 7.4 percent, despite COVID-19; That GDP recovered faster than in other European countries after the worst of the pandemic, and that foreign investment increased, even if at the expense of liberal reforms that included lowering the cost of layoffs and cutting benefits for the unemployed, among other measures. Which has caused more than one protest, and where the discontent over his reform of the deferred pension, under which workers must work more years and earn less for retirement, is finally listed.
On the other hand, many analysts warn of the danger of being confused with the far-right Marine Le Pen, who has softened her speech in an attempt to win supporters, an attempt that included in 2018 changing the name of the political group he founded. Her father is Jean-Marie Le Pen. Thus, the far-right National Front party will be renamed the National Group.
But her father’s political heiress did not betray her divorce.
During the campaign, he spoke of jobs, social inequalities and public services, but analysts at the digital magazine CounterPunch cautioned that “Le Pen’s economic perspective is nothing more than a socialist one.”
Thus, in the television debate that brought them face to face, Marine Le Pen presented herself as a “third way” and announced France’s solidarity in the fight against instability while, on the other hand, Macron justified that he had tried to make the best decisions in the midst of the pandemic and now with the conflict in Ukraine, He promised improvement in everyday life.
The difference between the two that the polls show is not vast. The distance between their way of doing things wouldn’t seem like much either.
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