The Weekly Dispatch - 13 February 2022
The Weekly Dispatch - 13 February 2022
Defections from the right, defections from the further-right, and a new energy strategy from the French President ahead of the Presidential Election
The Weekly Dispatch is your weekly summary of the major events taking place in French politics, published on Sundays in order to give you the perfect way to catch up with French news and events.
Polling Update
Another week, another poll!
Emmanuel Macron maintains his stability at the top of the pack, sitting at 25.5% in the most recent poll, while Marine Le Pen has gained an additiona 1%, bringing her to a firm second place at 18%. Meanwhile, Valérie Pécresse has managed to stymie the bleeding and has maintained her positions at 15%, but now has to contend with an Eric Zemmour who has now drawn level with her, gaining 1.5% in the polls to reach 15%.
On the left, we see more of the same as the candidates jockey with one another to come in fifth, sixth, sevent and eighth place. Jean-Luc Mélenchon has added 0.5% to his tally, bringing him up to a total of 10.5%, while Yannick Jadot has managed to add 0.5%
With Macron expected to make it to the second round of the Presidential election, the question appears to mostly be one of “who against?”, and thus up-to-date polling tells us quite a lot about the positions of the French population and what has changed since 2017.
Having gone to the second round against Marine Le Pen in 2017, Macron would see his victory against her be by a much smaller margin, with Le Pen doing around 11.1% better than she did in her last Presidential attempt.
While many (primarily on the left) would be tempted to claim that this is due to a population that has become far more right-wing in recent years, this could be due to a far more simple reason: Protest votes.
In 2017, one of the highest vote tallies went to nobody, with around four million French voters voting “blanc” to indicate that they wanted neither Macron or Le Pen to be in charge of the country. Not only this, but the total number of abstentions in the runoff vote was totalled at around 12 million. Therefore, around 16 million people didn’t vote for either candidate.
More than the 10.6 million citizens who votes for far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, around four million less than the number of citizens who votes for Emmanuel Macron (who received 20.7 million votes)
The reality is that this could very well transform into a vote against a candidate who some may believe is going to win by default, and therefore doesn’t deserve to be in the Elysee.
Regarding the other two potential second-round candidates, things look better for Macron. Valérie Pécresse, heralded as a Macron-beater only a few months ago, has seen her campaign stall and is now looking at a loss with only 44% of the vote going for her, but she can find comfort in the fact that she would still do around 5% better than far-right upstrart, Eric Zemmour.
Yet another Républicain Defection
Valérie Pécresse and Les Républicains’ problems aren’t showing any sign of slowing down anytime soon, as they have suffered from yet another defection within their ranks. But this time not to one of their far-right colleagues, but rather, towards the centrist incumbent Emmanuel Macron.
Éric Woerth, the former minister to Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of the Les Républicains federation in the Oise region, and the former Secretary General of the Républicains announced that he would support Macron instead of Pécresse.
Having maintained his silence because he “didn’t want to lie”, he come out and stated that a second cinquennat for the centrist "would be a chance for France” as it would have been if Sarkozy had won the election in 2012. “In the face of considerable challenges, France needs an experienced president…[and] no matter what people say, he showed that he knows how to manage the most serious crises”.
He also went on to state some rather punishing critiques towards his party, which he claimed was obsessed with “a nostalgic France shrivelled into itself” and which he said lacked an exciting perspective for the future which could be a critique levied at the majority of the right-and-far-right candidates that are currently fighting for the Elysee.
Naturally, the Républicains took this defection badly, with president Christian Jacob talking of his regret regarding this defection, particularly as the party supported him during “difficult moments” such as in the ongoing case regarding the financing of Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign.
Le Rassemblement moins rassemblé….
But the troubles are not only one for the Républicains, with the only Rassemblement National senator choosing defect from Marine Le Pen’s campaign, stating that he could no longer see his ideas in Le Pen’s work, and that instead he saw these in Zemmour’s campaign.
“It is evidently coherent, logical, to support Eric Zemmour” He stated at a press conference, outlining that he was giving his parrainage to Zemmour and that he was completely quitting the party that he had supported for 30 years.
Macron’s Nuclear Ambition
With the recent fight over the EU green taxonomy, the particularly aggressive French campaign to include nuclear within the rules, as well as the increasingl aggressive counter campaign by several countries such as Austria and Luxembourg, Emmanuel Macron came out this week to strengthen his ecological credentials and outline his new nuclear strategy.
Speaking at the General Electric factory in Belfort, he announced an extension in the usage of existing nuclear power plants by 50 years (so long as there is no danger), as well as the construction of six new EPR 2 nuclear reactors, which is expected to increase French energy production by 25 gigawatts between 2022 and 2050.
The big news from this is that the EPR 2 reactors are supposed to be far more simple to construct, making it a simpler and less costly affair to build, and that they will also be combined with small modular reactors, as well as “innovative” reactors that are expected to produce less waste.
The president also announced a plan to create 50 wind turbine farms in the ocean by 2050, in order to further increase French energy production by an additional 40 gigawatts by 2050.