The Weekly Dispatch - 9 January 2022
The Weekly Dispatch - 9 January 2022
A strong polling update, Macron pisses off the unvaccinated, Taubira attempts to lead the left, Les Républicains lose their former VP, and Pécresse loses her party.
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
Following his recent “scandalous” comments (which we’ll discuss below), Emmanuel Macron has come out with some of his strongest polling numbers in a 1st round election since he announced his candidacy for the 2017 elections, coming far ahead of all the opposition candidates with 27% of voting intention.
11 points behind him are both Marine Le Pen and Valerie Pécresse, both sitting at 16% with Pécresse having lost her slight advantage from just before christmas. Meanwhile, Eric Zemmour continues to languish in 4th place despite his strong initial showing, but has seen a slight improvement in his polling numbers.
Unfortunately for the candidate on the left, polling numbers appear to be getting worse, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Anne Hidalgo dropping another 0.5% compared to the pre-Christmas Polls
In polls for the second round, Emmanuel Macron continues to perform well against all of his potential opponents.
Macron is projected to earn his best result Eric Zemmour compared to the rest of the top 3 Presidential prospects. Having largely been invisible following his early splash, and struggling to make headway in an increasingly competitive fight in the right-wing political arena, Zemmour has not been able to capitalise on his early popularity or overcome initial scandals which included insulting a member of the public.
With Pécresse having been considered the best shot for the right to beat Macron due to her strong showing in initial polls following her election as the Les Républicains candidate, her polling numbers have continued to fall and she is now beginning to following a similar pattern that we have seen in Le Pen’s numbers.
However, one key thing to note is that Pécresse is that one who performs best against the incumbent (as of now, non-) candidate, and she could definitely improve on these numbers should she manage to correctly structure and execute her campaign while avoiding potential scandals.
Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen is also suffering in the polls, and while there’s a decent probability of her being able to overcome Pécresse based on her messaging these past few months (If she doesn’t end her campaign in January…), there are still serious questions about whether she will be able to overcome the questions of her aptitude for France’s most powerful role, and for one of the most powerful positions within the European Union.
Plus, she needs to be able compete with a president who is showing more and more strength in his statements…
"I really want to piss the unvaccinated off”
In a brazen move that shocked many, and took the opposition by surprise, Emmanuel Macron took an incredibly aggressive stance against anti-vaxxers and the non-vaccinated. an exclusive interview with Le Parisien during the week where he outlined the way in which he plans to punish those who refuse to get vaccinated.
"I really want to piss the unvaccinated off... You have to tell them: from January 15, you will no longer be able to go to the restaurant, have a drink, drink a coffee, go to the theatre, go to the cinema."
While many were baffled by the strong statement, as well as what “prendre un canon” (literally “take a canon”) meant, the country argued over whether it was acceptable for such an action to be taken by the French state, as well as whether a French president should make such a statement.
Early polls done by ELABE for BFM showed that a slight majority of French citizens were shocked by the statement, but this hides some particularly interesting facts.
When looking at the date, only 48% of French people were shocked by these comments, including 32% who were very shocked and 16% who were ‘quite’ shocked (a distinction I continue to try to understand). On the other hand, 52% were not shocked, including 26% not really and 26% not at all.
Alongside this, you could see a very clear breakdown in shock according to the vaccination status and party camp of those polled (surprise surprise). Around 70% of those who vaccinated without hesitation (representing 67% of total vaccinated people) said they were not shocked by these comments. Meanwhile, nearly 70% of those who claim they were vaccinated by force (33% of those vaccinated) were shocked. Almost nine in ten unvaccinated were shocked, including seven in ten who declared themselves “very shocked”.
Meanwhile, in political circles, Jean-Luc Mélenchon declared the statement “appalling”, while Marine Le Pen did her bit to strengthen her campaign by claiming that Emmanuel Macron wants “to wage a war against a segment of the French people”.
While Macron was arguably right to push forward the the vaccination pass, and while many will decidedly support his moves and his statement, many have wondered why the President decided to take such a strong position, with some declaring it a campaign act, while others believe it may simply be the president losing patience with the situation.
The likeliest reason, however, would be that Macron is pushing to end the crisis, and believed that the only way to instil in people the reality of the vaccination pass and a fear of how their exclusion from society may look, which many have brushed off as ‘unworkable’ or feeble campaign actions, he had to move to shock the public with a strong statement.
While many were surprised and disliked this statement, it seems to be working, with 1st vaccination numbers going up and signs looking positive, and this may be the shot in the arm that the French anti-covid campaign needed.
Taubira moves to lead the left
To the left, we’ve seen another move towards the candidature of Socialist stalwart Christiane Taubira, but only under very specific conditions.
With the upcoming Primaire populaire, planned to take place from the 27th to the 30th of January, Taubira is taking a risk that she can, firstly, compete with any of the more popular candidates such as Anne Hidalgo, but also potential participants such as Yannick Jadot and Jean-Luic Mélenchon..
Not only this, but she runs the additional risk of having participated in this primary for the left-wing candidates, which has more chance of exploding as it does succeeding.
The reality is that, candidates such as Mélenchon and Jadot have shown that they’re not interested in a Union of the left, because they already hold the two strongest candidacies on the left (and are currently polling better than a potential Taubira candidacy which sits at 5%) and they stand to lose more than they can gain.
Unfortunately, it seems that Taubira may have played her cards far too late, and while she may have been able to act as a unifying figure for the left and bring the family together for a stronger campaign, the reality is that it appears that it may have taken place far too later.
Défection from Les Républicains
Having said that, the right is having it’s own problems when it comes to political infighting.
An interesting announcement filtered its way into our inboxes this morning, where we found out that Guillaume Peltier, the former vice-president of Les Républicains, former spokesperson for Nicolas Sarkozy, and as of this morning an active MP for the party, had chosen to join far-right candidate Eric Zemmour’s campaign.
The most interesting thing, which many have missed in this story, is that this isn’t out of character for Peltier. His roots can be traced back to the Front national, where he was an active members back in 1996, and he only joined the soft-Eurosceptic Gaullist party, Mouvement pour la France, in 2001, where he remained until he joined Nicolas Sarkozy in the ‘Union pour un mouvement populaire’ which eventually became Les Républicains.
I swear, French politics is really simple.
While he has abandoned the party that he has been a part of for over a decade (regardless of if he was kicked out within an hour of his announcement), the import point to note is that he made this decision due to his preferred candidate in the LR primary, Eric Ciotti, and his dislike for Valerie Pécresse.
I made my decision with great seriousness and enthusiasm … I was number two in the Republicans, spokesperson for Nicolas Sarkozy, and on behalf of the 40% of LR members who voted as me for Eric Ciotti, I decided to support Eric Zemmour so that he is our next President of the Republic.
Obviously, this went down like a sack of bricks, with Christian Jacob, acting President of Les Republicains, swiftly reacting by ejecting him from the party.
While he no longer exercised any responsibility in the instances of LR, Guillaume Peltier returned to his roots by joining Éric Zemmour. By this decision, he is de facto excluded from our political family and can no longer claim it.
Regardless, for the time being, nobody can tell if this will have a big impact on the party, and whether this is the first drop in a wave of defection and in the meantime, Les Républicains have even bigger issues when it comes to discipline.
Pécresse loses her party
In scenes that were shocking in all of the wrong ways, Valérie Pécresse appeared to completely lose control of her party during a recent vote on the vaccination pass in the Assemblée Nationale.
Having called for Les Républicains MPs to vote in favour of the pass, and having insisted that deputies from her party “would not oppose” the law putting this into place, she lost two-thirds of her party.
When the counting was done, out of the 103 deputies that her party have in the chamber, only 28 voted in line with their presidential candidate and supported the law putting in place the vaccination pass, with 24 voting against, and 22 abstaining completely, which was a painful reminder of how far she has to go in stamping her authority on her party.