The politicians’ appeals had sounded almost like pleading for the past week, but they were not heard. Even in the second round of the regional elections, the vast majority of the French did not cast their votes. The number of non-voters reached a record high of 66 percent, exactly as many as in the first round of the regional elections on June 20.
One of the reasons for the low turnout was identified by the opinion research institutes as the time of the election, which had been postponed due to the pandemic and now took place shortly before the summer holidays at an unusual date for France. In addition, the election campaign could only be conducted in a reduced form due to the applicable hygiene and distance rules. And finally, the regional elections are considered a stepchild of French democracy anyway. The citizens can be mobilized for the presidential elections, also for the local and parliamentary elections – but who governs the regions is much less interested.
However, the disinterest has never been as pronounced as this time. A comparison with the regional elections in 2015 shows a drop in voter turnout of a good 16 percentage points. In 2015, almost 50 percent of the French cast their votes in the first ballot. In 2021 it was now 33 percent.
Above all, those parties that left the election evening as losers emphasized that it was not primarily their own candidates who were defeated that evening, but rather the democratic institutions as a whole. Marlène Schiappa (member of the ruling party La République en Marche, assistant minister and unsuccessful candidate in the Île-de-France region) spoke of a “great lesson in humility” that bore the results. Jordan Bardella, vice-chairman of Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN) and also an unsuccessful candidate in the regional elections, said the low turnout was a “failure for the whole of the political class”.
The Macron and Le Pen parties are losing significantly
Neither the ruling party La République en Marche (LREM) nor the RN managed to win a region. The LREM, founded by President Emmanuel Macron, fared even worse than expected. If you add up the results of all lists nationwide, it only got seven percent of the vote. Le Pen’s RN was the second strongest party in the majority of the region, but was clearly trailing behind the winners in every single region. In the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA) region, opinion research institutes had expected a neck-and-neck race between right-wing extremist candidate Thierry Mariani and Republican Renaud Muselier. Instead, Muselier won with a lead of 13.6 percentage points over Mariani and got 56.8 percent of the votes.
It is not only in the PACA region that the Republicans are the clear winners of the French regional elections. The Conservatives were able to hold all seven regions that they had already won in 2015, their lists got 38 percent of the vote nationwide. Xavier Bertrand, who clearly won the Hauts-de-France region with 53 percent of the vote, presented himself with undisguised national ambitions on Sunday evening. “Here and now,” said Bertrand, there is a new “hope”. Bertrand wants to run for the presidential election next year.
The socialists also see themselves strengthened after the regional elections. They could keep their five regions. Together with the French Greens (EELV) they get more than 30 percent of the votes nationwide. The comparatively strong performance of the Republicans and the left-green alliances with the comparatively weak performance of the Macron and Le Pen lists means that the 2022 presidential election will appear in a new light. A duel between Macron and Le Pen now seems less inevitable than it did a few weeks ago.