Polling update

Right, here we go then.

With the second round of the French Presidential election on the horizon, polling shows that the gap between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen is increasingly tight. In the poll above, there’s only a 5% gap between Marine Le Pen and the presidency, a margin that many would argue is far too tight to be acceptable.

However, many have asked whether this is likely to be the case.

We’re seeing indications that this initial wave of support may have been supporters of other candidates lashing out at Macrons apparently easy first round victory, and wanting to make their discontent felt.

Thankfully, France Info did a series of polls that give us a bit more information on which side people are leaning towards below.

For those who are absolutely certain that they will vote on the 24th of April, the margin is much wider than people assume, with a 10% margin of support for Emmanuel Macron within these categories of French citizens.

To follow up, France Info polled supporters of the other candidates to see who they were planning on supporting in one week, and the results were quite surprising.

We expected the majority of non far-right candidate supporters to not back Marine Le Pen, yet there is a surprising number of left-wing supporters who appear to be perfectly content to vote either for Le Pen, or against Emmanuel Macron. Whether these are actually protest votes, however, is left to be seen.

The Economist also worked on creating a poll-of-polls which has tracked the average of polls across the board, in order to create a prediction of vote share on the 24th of April. It’s one of the trackers to watch as it gives us a good idea of the direction of travel.

The tracker suggests that the gap between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen have been slowly widening since the day of the first round, which could be very good news for the incumbent who has been regularly attacked for being a divisive president who reinforced the far-right.

Based on these figures, The Economist is continuing to predict a second Macron presidency, and yet another loss for Marine Le Pen. But, is this really something that can be taken for granted?

Calls to dissolve the Socialist Party

Former first secretary of the Socialist Party, Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, recently called for the Socialist party to auto-dissolve itself after the political crisis the party is dealing with. Cambadélis urged it be replaced with a new popular social-democrat party that can move past the failures of the PS.

Whether this is something that could work is a question that nobody can quite answer, however.

Between La France Insoumise, which controls the populist far-left, and Territoires de Progrès, which has a monopoly over the centre-left reformist position from within the presidential majority, there isn’t much space for the socialists to reform their party and rebuild their controlling stake in what was once a unified left.

Yet should Francois Hollande manage an election victory in the legislative elections, and should he capture a majority of the support from within the existing structure of the PS, there’s every chance that he could find himself with the necessary platform to break through the mud and begin the process of rebuilding the once mighty party.

Macron outlines his ecological positions

Appearing in front of crowds in Marseille as he campaigns for his re-election, President Emmanuel Macron’s election promises took an ecological turn.

“The politics that I’ll engage in for the next five years will be ecological or will not”

The biggest announcement that was made was that, if he won reelection, the next Prime Minister would be “tasked with ecological planning” which would include “all domains, all sectors, and all investments”.

Alongside this, the French state would find itself with two new ministers: a minister for energy planning, who would be tasked with making France “the first state to stop the use of gas, petrol and coal”, partially through the development of nuclear energy.

Alongside this, a new minister responsible for ‘Territorial ecological planning’, who would be tasked with organising cooperations with with local elected official regarding the environmental transition of each territory.

Is this the best way to go? And is this going to be an effective way of governing? Many would argue that adding ministers could lead to an increasingly bloated bureaucratic structure where even more permission are required for political movements within the country.

However, on the other hand, we can see a very clear attempt to answer the questions of the population, and an attempt to find proper solutions to the increasingly serious environmental questions that France is facing today, and having ministers charged exclusively with helping French regions and territories with transforming their economies and production systems can only be of huge benefit to our country, and to the wider European Union.

La France Insoumise Votes Blanc

Jean-Luc Melenchon always said that, should he not make it into the second round of the Presidential elections, that he would return to speak to his supporters and sponsors to ask them what they believe should be done with their collective votes, and this consultation was held on Saturday 16 April, just over a week before the elections.

Unfortunately, in another sign that the cordon sanitaire no longer exists, the votes are in and the support did not go towards Emmanuel Macron

Out of the 215,292 people who were able to vote, 37.65% voted for a white and nul vote, 33.4% chose a vote for Emmanuel Macron, and 28.96% voted for a total abstention from the second round of the presidential vote.

Now, while many people could safely assume that the results of this vote would be absolute and that everyone within La France Insoumise will do exactly what this vote dictates, the reality is that this is simply not the case.

Many would see voting blanc or abstaining for the vote to be an irresponsible act that could lead to the victory of Marine le Pen, and this is something that several LFI militants have told me outright.

However, this doesn’t mean that Emmanuel Macron should take the votes from these parties for granted, as many do have some similar positions to Le Pen on topics of foreign affairs or economics, and combined with a serious dislike for Emmanuel Macron, after his quinquennat, this could lead some people to feel that a protest vote for the far-right could be justifiable, no matter what Melenchon says.