If the poster is the same as during the last presidential election, the political landscape has profoundly changed in the space of 5 years. The RN candidate notably managed to normalize her image. The Republican front seems more uncertain than ever.
A deceptive sense of deja vu. While the second round duel again pits Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen against each other as in the previous presidential election, the situation is very different in 2022: polls show, such as our Elabe study for BFMTV and The Express with our partner SFR, who announce a much tighter face-to-face. BFMTV.com explains the differences between this poster and the one from 2017.
• Marine Le Pen has profoundly changed her image
Photos of cats that saturate her Instagram, onlookers very happy to meet her in a market, her secrets about her single life and her dinners with her roommate… With the exception of her hectic trip to Guadeloupe, Marine Le Pen , who temporarily withdrew from the presidency of the party, presented in recent months the face of a very smooth candidate.
“She has indeed polished her personal image, appears less sharp, campaigns around ‘real people’, in small towns”, explains political scientist Jean-Yves Camus, specialist in the far right, to BFMTV.com.
The 2017 campaign had a completely different taste between several legal cases which targeted it, its retreat on the exit of France from the euro zone and the European Union and strong tensions in its team between Marion Maréchal and Florian Philippot. To succeed in her transformation, Marine Le Pen this time focused her entire campaign on purchasing power while being on minimum service on the most identified themes of the RN such as the fight against insecurity or the drastic reduction of all immigration. .
If its program on the merits has not changed, Marine Le Pen has also been served by the candidacy of Éric Zemmour. The boss of Reconquête, for his part, focused on themes close to the far right, multiplying the excesses.
By being more radical in both form and substance, he positively changed the image that the French have of the candidate. “He was a bit of a lightning rod by his excesses, his provocations à la Le Pen father”, notes Philippe Oliveier, political adviser to Marine Le Pen.
• Vote reserves for Marine Le Pen
In the first round in 2017, Marine Le Pen won 21.30% of the vote and 33.90% in the second round, a relatively weak progression which shows that she had not managed to broaden her electoral base. Emmanuel Macron had gone from 24.01% to 66.10%. This year, the situation is very different, especially with the candidacy of Éric Zemmour.
Part of her score of 7.3% in the first round should go to Marine Le Pen: according to our Elabe poll for BFMTV and The Express carried out with our partner SFR, 86% of its voters should turn to the National Rally in the second round.
It is also possible that supporters of Valérie Pécresse who campaigned on security could turn to the RN in the second round: still according to our Elabe poll, 40% of them are tempted by this option, against 44% in move towards Emmanuel Macron and 16% for abstention.
There are also some supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, even if the rebellious said that “not a single vote” should go to Marine Le Pen: 34% of his voters could turn to the far right in the second, against 35% towards Emmanuel Macron and 31% towards abstention, according to our Elabe poll.
The president-candidate has already filled up the votes in the first round with 28.2% of the vote. The broadening of its electoral base could turn out to be less important than in 2017.
• A republican front more difficult to set up
While several candidates had announced that they would vote for Emmanuel Macron on the evening of the first round, such as François Fillon and Benoît Hamon in 2017, Marine Le Pen acting as a foil, the situation is no longer the same. “It’s going to be a difficult duel because there will be no republican front,” feared an adviser to Emmanuel Macron before the first round. “His de-demonization business has worked well.”
“The Republican front was already in trouble in 2017, but it is now in a state of clinical death,” said Bernard Sananès, head of the Elabe polling institute on BFMTV on April 6.
On the benches of the RN, we also say that we are convinced that the candidate who will win will be the one who “causes the least rejection”. The French who will vote to block one or the other are now more likely to want to oppose Emmanuel Macron (19%) than Marine Le Pen (18%) according to a study Odoxa for The Obs.
Certainly, many unsuccessful candidates in the first round called to vote for Emmanuel Macron, like Valérie Pécresse. But the instruction is sometimes moderately followed in their own camp: the deputy LR Eric Ciotti has for example already announced that he will not “support the outgoing president, do not “recognize (sant) not in his policy”.
• A probably very different in-between debate
Rolled out of her debate between two rounds in 2017 during which she appeared nervous, sometimes aggressive and uncomfortable on several issues, Marine Le Pen learned from her mistakes. While she had confessed to having arrived “very tired” on D-Day, her team lightened her schedule during this campaign, so that she could recover between her meetings and her travels.
On the other side, Emmanuel Macron, who refused any debate with his competitors before the first round, will have to justify his results. Within La République en Marche, we say we are aware of the difficulty of the exercise. “Whatever she says, whatever she does, she was so bad five years ago that she will come out on top this time,” a campaign member told BFMTV.