This year, the presidential campaign was combined with the future. Some candidates -Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Emmanuel Macron in the lead- have gone all out to create large innovative gatherings and amaze their activists (and smell). During his meeting in Lille on Tuesday, we saw the leader of rebellious France split in the form of a hologram in 11 cities in France, a few weeks after having organized an olfactory and immersive meeting. For his part, the current President of the Republic invited himself into the Minecraft game on April 2 to offer a virtual meeting (a little disappointing for its lack of fun, but that is not the question). What next ? Will we find ourselves in 2027 facing a rabbit avatar as a presidential candidate in a decentralized metaverse where activists finance the campaign with NFTs? It’s possible.
Surfing on video games or innovations is first and foremost a question of image for candidates. “We show that we have mastered the codes, that we are not behind, analyzes Olivier Mauco, teacher at Sciences-Po and specialist in video games and politics. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s meetings are quite spectacular, they look good from an aesthetic point of view. He shows that he lives with the times”. For the candidate of rebellious France, it is also a way of making people forget their age. “Okay I’m old, but I’m young in my practice, in my way of being and I make you live a unique moment”, confirms the communication specialist Philippe Moreau-Chevrolet.
Visible and invisible innovations
Jean-Luc Mélenchon has a culture of innovation through the need for image and because he knew how to surround himself with enthusiasts. “For example, he is the only candidate to take the video game as a cultural issue and to integrate it into his program, notes Olivier Mauco. For Emmanuel Macron, there is also a form of consistency: he has announced a European metaverse and he is organizing a meeting on Minecraft”. A (very small) first step into the virtual world. The two candidates clearly take the lead over their rivals in terms of innovation. But not everyone can afford it financially. Recall that the immersive and olfactory meeting of the candidate of rebellious France cost 300,000 euros, had specified in January the campaign director on BFMTV. You have to be able to get them out.
That said, other parties are not left out. The team of far-right candidate Eric Zemmour has a head start in digital innovation. “They are by far the best in terms of digital influence, they manage to create controversy, rumours… If you look at the McKinsey affair, when you look at the figures on Visibrain [la plateforme de veille sur le Web et les réseaux sociaux], far-right activists have made it possible to impose this very technical subject in the campaign, points out Philippe Moreau-Chevrolet. The amplification of the Zemmour camp and the National Rally shows the firepower of digital innovation when it is mastered”.
The metaverse would solve the security problem
But back to our campaign meetings. There are other spectacular innovations that we don’t see. LREM, for example, has a great mastery of orchestration. “Finding popular songs on Spotify, like The Kiffance of Naps, and to hijack it to make a meeting song, it’s very clever and it can’t be seen as a hologram”, notes the political communication specialist who recalls that during a meeting of Emmanuel Macron in 2017 the applause was remote controlled via smartphones to give an impression of popular fervor. All these behind-the-scenes tricks make it a prodigious spectacle for those present and are invisible to the naked eye, like in front of a magic act. But why the hell make crates of them during these gatherings?
You have to create magic. And today it is all the more important that these meetings are rebroadcast on television. “It’s mostly for the cameras. We need things to happen all the time, for there to be a slap, well-managed light. It has to be a show of sustained quality, explains Philippe Moreau-Chevrolet. “. In short, there are two levels of communication, that of the meeting and that of its rebroadcast, which impose real gymnastics on the candidate.
Of course, we could have expected more virtuality in this campaign after two years of teleworking on zoom, but we can easily imagine meetings in the metaverse for the 2027 campaign (or the next one). It will be less televisual and it will be necessary to solve the problem of online polarization, but the virtual could also bring a little flexibility. “The technology has to be widespread enough for it to make sense,” continues the communications specialist. Today, the question of security in meetings is growing, it’s expensive, you have to travel, it’s exhausting for the candidates… In politics, the metaverse will have the advantage of bringing people together in different territories, you you can moderate, ban, facilitate the dialogue…” Bring lightness and fun. As long as we find in the virtual spaces of socialization so dear to the experience of IRL campaign meetings.
The party of the future will take the form of a DAO
And if we play it even more futuristic, we can imagine a decentralized and autonomous party without any candidate to carry it. Here we enter science fiction and yet it is at hand with the DAO [Decentralized Autonomous Organization]. In VF, decentralized and autonomous organization. It is a means of building a community on the Web, based on the blockchain, which makes it possible to inscribe the rules of governance in an immutable way on technology (Ethereum, the second blockchain after Bitcoin, whose currency is known as name of ether). “It is not absurd that a DAO emerges to take power, prophesies Olivier Mauco. The DAO will revolutionize the associative world. It is not delusional that the next party emerges in this way”. In the place of the candidate, we would have the smart contract, that is to say the computer programs which make it possible to execute the rules defined by the members.
Imagine a party that no longer needs a charismatic incarnation to launch a campaign. There, the rabbit avatar (or panda, it’s as you like) would take the place of a Valérie Pécresse or a Jean Lassalle to bring the ideas of its activists to the metaverse. It will perhaps remobilize the abstentionists, who knows?