8, 9, 10, sometimes 11%. In this pre-election campaign, the polls are not very good for Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The last granting him 13% of voting intentions already dates back to the end of September, just after his debate with Eric Zemmour. Admittedly, these opinion polls almost always place him in the lead on the left, but more often than not, still far from a hypothetical second round. Within La France insoumise, we console ourselves by watching the 2017 campaign: at this time, Jean-Luc Mélenchon was far from the 19.58% of the votes collected in the first round. The rebellious wave did not come until much later, from February.
Several party spokespersons, such as Adrien Quatennens on France Inter at the beginning of November, were more precise: “All the polls that we comment on are polls with roughly 50 or 60% participation. So of two things one: if the presidential election is at 50% of participation that means that, as some dream of it, the popular circles are excluded and we will be in bad scores […]. If popular circles mobilize, then yes we can be in the second round. ” 20 minutes wanted to know if the deputy from the North was telling the truth to Paul Cébille, director of studies at Ifop.
Do polling institutes take into account the voting intentions of those who say today that they do not want to vote?
The confusion arises from the fact that institutes do not have quite the same methods when presenting their figures. Ipsos, for example, takes into account people who intend to vote. We at Ifop ask people about their intention to vote, but when we ask for the intention to vote, we include those who do not think they will vote. So, theoretically, the figures we give – for Jean-Luc Mélenchon as for the others – relate almost to the entire electorate. There are still the people who tell us that they do not know who they are going to vote for, and it is still an important part at this stage.
Among the people who say today that they do not want to vote, do we actually find the lower classes in particular?
It is still somewhat the case. Even on election day, we know that it is rather the popular categories who abstain. But I don’t have the feeling that this is the problem for the Mélenchon electorate. Because if we look at the voting intentions of the popular categories, we see that at this stage, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is not in the lead. We rather have Marine Le Pen, then Emmanuel Macron and even Eric Zemmour. We can see that these candidates are not particularly penalized by the phenomenon described by rebels.
In 2017, was the Mélenchon vote so popular?
It is not as characteristic of the Mélenchon vote as that. Jean-Luc Mélenchon is very strong in what we at Ifop call “others and inactive”, where we find many people who declare themselves to be students. It is therefore rather strong in a part of the youth or, by definition, when one is a student or one enters the labor market, one is inevitably among the popular categories, if only by its level of income. So of course, in 2017, he is a little stronger than his average in the popular categories but, in this category, there is much stronger than him: Marine Le Pen. And today, the candidate of the RN is not disadvantaged by a possible disinterest of the popular categories.
How then to explain the sharp decline of Jean-Luc Mélenchon compared to 2017?
In 2017 – certainly not at the same stage of the campaign, we were a few days before the poll – Jean-Luc Mélenchon took back 72% of his electorate in 2012. He therefore succeeded in remobilizing his electorate. At this stage, in our last poll in October 2021, he only found 37% of his electorate in 2017. There was a leak from his electorate, which explains why he is so weak in the intentions of vote. A good part of those wants to vote for Yannick Jadot and another part, more anecdotal, goes either towards Fabien Roussel or towards Anne Hidalgo.
We are very early in the campaign, but do you see other different elements for Jean-Luc Mélenchon that could create difficulties for him compared to 2017?
In March 2021, we conducted a survey on Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s image traits. When we compare to the measure of April 2017, so just before the election, the evolution is quite noticeable. When you ask “are you worried about Jean-Luc Mélenchon?” “, We go from 38% of yes in 2017 of people in agreement to 59% in 2021.” Is it close to the concerns of the French? », That goes from 76% to 40%. For “does he have the stature of a president?” ”, We fall from 46% to 21%. All that can obviously move – moreover it changed in 2017 -, but the decline is so important that we have here an image that has deteriorated a lot, and on fundamental items in a presidential election. In my opinion, that better explains the weakness of his voting intentions at the moment than these questions of participation.