Erwan Lestrohan is Client Manager for the Odoxa survey company.
FIGAROVOX. - Odoxa's political barometer for Mascaret, LCP, Public Senate and the regional press measures the popularity of the personalities who make up the French political landscape. What lessons can we learn from the figures for November?
Erwan LESTROHAN. -
Our measure for the month of November brings many lessons to 6 months before the first round of the presidential election.
The main lesson is that as he approaches the end of his term, Emmanuel Macron's popularity base is at a high level compared to that of his predecessors. 44% of French people today judge that he is a good President when they were only 17% to think so for François Hollande in November 2016 and 38% to have a good opinion of Nicolas Sarkozy in November 2011. This high level approval of his action is higher than the share of people who intend to vote for him in the first round of the 2022 presidential election (25% in our last poll for Saegus and L'Obs) and places the president in a favorable configuration in this perspective.
Emmanuel Macron could see aggregate, in the second round, support for his candidacy from people of whom he is not the first electoral choice but who have a positive opinion of his action as head of state.
Erwan Lestrohan
In the event that he is a candidate for re-election, this base of Emmanuel Macron's popularity could indeed grant him a strategic advantage compared to other declared or prospective candidates by allowing him to gather beyond his base in the first round. .
He could thus see aggregate, in the second round, support for his candidacy from people of whom he is not the first electoral choice but who have a positive opinion of his action as head of state.
In comparison, the membership ratings of Marine Le Pen (31%) and Xavier Bertrand (28%) are a notch down, these personalities nevertheless ahead of Valérie Pécresse (24%), Michel Barnier (22%), Éric Zemmour (21%), Jean-Luc Mélenchon (20%), Anne Hidalgo (18%) and Yannick Jadot (16%).
And it should also be noted that each of these potential candidates still remains “locked up” or in competition in their political space.
Thus, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Anne Hidalgo or Yannick Jadot have very limited support beyond the borders of the left, just like Marine Le Pen outside the National Rally.
Read also Presidential 2022: "Who can loosen the Macron-Le Pen pincers?"
Xavier Bertrand is today the political figure with the highest membership rating among right-wing supporters (65%, + 5pts this month). With 69% of membership among LR sympathizers, it is also ahead of Valérie Pécresse (62%) and Michel Barnier (53%) with its “partisan” base. This gives a trend but in no way predicts the outcome of the vote of the only activists who will be called upon to nominate the candidate who will represent the Republicans in the 2022 presidential election. It will in any case be interesting to see, whoever the nominated person is. , if his inauguration generates a dynamic in the opinion and allows the Republicans to have a wider attention of the French. At the moment this is in any case not excluded:41% of French people and 75% of LR supporters considered in our survey last week to
Le Figaro
and Backbone consulting that the candidate who will be invested by Les Républicains could win the presidential election.
According to this survey, Marine Le Pen is the 3rd political personality generating the most adhesions or sympathy with the French, while causing less rejection than Eric Zemmour or Jean-Luc Mélenchon. If the presidential candidate wins the battle of opinion here, will it necessarily be read at the ballot box?
The case of Marine Le Pen is very specific.
Just like Éric Zemmour or Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he is a divisive personality, who has a significant base of support while at the same time being rejected by a large part of the general public who associate him with a certain radicalism. .
But, unlike the leader of La France Insoumise and the former CNews journalist, she now seems slightly more consensual in terms of image. Its membership rating (31%) is significantly higher than that of Eric Zemmour (21%) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (20%) and the proportion of French people who reject it is lower: 49%, against 55% for Jean-Luc Mélenchon and 61% for Éric Zemmour. The image of the RN candidate also seems to have calmed down at the same time as her movement has “normalized”: in particular we measure that the proportion of French people who consider her aggressive has gone from 73% in 2014 to 55% today. hui.
The strong competition between the various right-wing candidates (LR, Zemmour, Le Pen) has a double impact: it splits up the electoral capital of this political space at the same time as it lowers the qualification threshold for the second round.
Erwan Lestrohan
However, this more favorable place for Marine Le Pen in public opinion remains confronted with an extremist political position and fairly ingrained negative image traits which still make her ability to bring people together very uncertain.
And this situation does not currently augur a potential rise in voting intentions.
In our poll, 78% of French people consider that Marine Le Pen is of the extreme right, 60% that she is racist and 54% that she is dangerous.
And the share of French people who currently intend to vote for her in the first round of the presidential election (18 to 19%) remains below her score in the first round of 2017 (21.3%), a level indicating a step back rather than a progress compared to the previous electoral sequence.
Does the hypothesis of a duel Emmanuel Macron-Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election seem to be confirmed?
On reading these figures and our latest surveys, it is this duel that appears most likely today.
Let us say first of all that with a potential of around 25% of the votes cast, all the surveys produced by the various polling institutes above all validate the qualification of Emmanuel Macron in the 2nd round of the presidential election if the first tour took place next Sunday. And in our latest survey, it is indeed Marine Le Pen (18 to 19%) who appears most likely to be opposed to the Head of State on April 24, 2022, in a 2nd round configuration identical to 2017. .
But we must also keep in mind that in the current sequence, the strong competition between the various right-wing candidates (LR, Zemmour, Le Pen) has a double impact: it splits up the electoral capital of this political space at the same time as it lowers the qualification threshold for the second round.
Thus, a positive dynamic could allow candidates other than Marine Le Pen to climb to the second round.
Read also Doctor President or Mister Candidate, Emmanuel Macron's dilemma
This could for example be the case of the candidate invested by the Republicans benefiting from the “blast effect” of his designation by the LR militants. And it is not completely to be excluded either, even if this hypothesis seems extremely unlikely today, that this greater accessibility of the second round will not benefit a union candidate from the left if ever Jean-Luc Mélenchon ( 8.5 to 9% of the voting intentions), Yannick Jadot (6.5 to 7%), Anne Hidalgo (4.5 to 5%) and Arnaud Montebourg (2 to 2.5%) came to find a field of agreement around a common program and a personality able to carry it.
Very soon, we will have to keep a close eye on the movements of opinion following the Republican Congress, the many meetings to come in December (Zemmour, Mélenchon, Hidalgo, Jadot).
Erwan Lestrohan
The chances of seeing Eric Zemmour appear in the second round of the presidential election also remain high.
With 14% of voting intentions in our last survey, the author of
Suicide Français
is at the gates of a qualification, at a level very close to that of Marine Le Pen. At the moment, however, the dynamic is rather negative concerning him: he lost 2 points in the voting intentions expressed by the French in our last survey, and, more worrying, in particular saw the support for him decline in two segments. voters likely to constitute reserves of votes for his candidacy: 65 years and over and supporters of the National Rally. Note also that its membership rating fell by 7 points among supporters of the right in our political barometer.
These elements therefore restore the current structuring of the national political landscape, but very soon it will also be necessary to have a close eye on the movements of opinion following the Congress of Republicans, the many meetings to come in December (Zemmour, Mélenchon, Hidalgo, Jadot).
And the electoral campaign, still mainly followed by the most politicized French people for the time being, will also be an opportunity to assess the extent to which the various candidates meet the expectations of the French who today express needs having as a common denominator the wish to be protected.
They thus express, at similar levels, demands for health, social and environmental protection as well as economic, security or psychological.
And the whole stake for the candidates who will take part in the next presidential campaign will have to be to indicate to them that they are able to implement effective public policies and able to advance their situations in a climate of mistrust with regard to the performance of political action.
