Presidential 2022: the CSA sued over the management of speaking time

Many of them are already officially candidates for the presidential election and some would like to be able to make themselves heard against the competitors who monopolize the television shows and the radio mornings.

Alexandre Langlois, former secretary general of the police union Vigi, is one of those who feel aggrieved.

Thursday, with the support of his lawyers, he decided to file before the administrative court of Paris a request for interim interim relief in order to challenge the methods of calculating the speaking time of the candidates, constituting, according to him, deep inequalities between the aspirants to the Elysee.

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His request, which Le Parisien was able to consult, evokes the fact that a certain number of candidates “do not benefit from any access to the media despite the fundamental rules in the matter”.

Two appeals were in fact filed.

One on the merits, which could not be tried before "several months", according to his lawyer Me Antoine Péchard.

The other in summary proceedings, which should lead the Paris administrative court to take a position within just a few days.

A letter was also sent Thursday to Prime Minister Jean Castex on this subject, in order to specify the criteria for the validity of polls in pre-election and electoral periods, by regulation or that of a bill to be tabled "without delay".

"We mechanically rule out five or ten candidates"

Concretely, Alexandre Langlois explains wanting to obtain better supervision of the speaking time of declared candidates. In the pre-election period, in which we find ourselves today, television channels and radio stations are required to guarantee "a fair intervention time with regard to the elements of their representativeness", wrote the CSA in a deliberation dated November 22, 2017. Five criteria are currently used to establish this representativeness: the results of the past elections, the number of elected representatives, the size of the groups in Parliament, their contribution to the animation of the national political debate as well as "the indications of opinion polls. "

It is on this last criterion that the appeal of the former police officer is based. "The small candidates have no elected, sometimes candidate for the first time," explains Me Péchard. By letting the polling institutes not include them in their opinion polls, we automatically exclude five or ten candidates from the ballot, ”he pleads. The lawyer evokes an incongruous situation, since it is these same polls which according to him allow Eric Zemmour to benefit from a significant airtime, and this while the latter is not even officially declared a candidate. "Including Mr. Eric Zemmour when Mr. Alexandre Langlois is ignored, is likely to favor certain personalities to the detriment of others, without any legally admissible reason and ultimately contributes to the infidelity of the ballot," he defends.The CSA tells us that it is based on polls to enforce the duty of fairness but we forgot to define how these polls should be carried out. "

Alexandre Langlois asks that the control of the speaking time of the candidates in the elections be based on polls including all the candidates and only the candidates. "Free for television channels to do other surveys on the side to measure the popularity of Eric Zemmour or Emmanuel Macron, but the CSA should not be based on them to carry out its control", still pleads the lawyer. Such a measure would not hamper the speaking time of the outgoing President of the Republic, the latter having a special status as head of state, he adds. As for Eric Zemmour, the lawyer believes that the latter could perfectly well declare himself a candidate to be integrated into these “official” investigations, taken into account by the CSA. "It's too easy to take advantage of such speaking time and not declare yourself".It remains to be seen whether Alexandre Langlois will be heard by the courts. In the meantime, he calls on the other small candidates to join him in his initiative.