Seven months before the presidential election, the French say they are more pessimistic about the state of the country than they were before the 2022 vote and expect ‘real social and political change’ to come with this election, according to a major study of more than 13,000 people, AFP reported on Monday.
The poll, conducted by research institute Ipsos-BVA CESI for the newspaper Le Monde, the Centre for Political Research at Sciences Po and the Jean Jaurès Foundation and Institut Montaigne think tanks, confirms that far-right candidate Marine Le Pen is leading voting intentions for the first round, scheduled for 18 April.
For this presidential election, 71% of French people say they expect ‘real social and political change’, compared with 51% before the 2022 presidential election, while 54% believe society needs to be transformed in depth, with 26% wanting this change to be radical.
They express pessimism about the situation in France, marked by economic recession and a serious public-finance crisis, and report feelings of anxiety (59%, compared with 38% in October 2021), uncertainty (51%) and also anger (30%, up from 16%).
Almost three-quarters of the population (74%) believe that the country’s situation will deteriorate. Before the 2022 presidential election, only 45% thought this way.
As regards voting intentions, the poll confirms the general trend showing that Marine Le Pen, the candidate of the National Rally (RN), is comfortably ahead in the first round (33% to 35%).
She is followed at some distance by far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise or centre-right candidate Edouard Philippe, according to the six electoral configurations tested.
In four of these scenarios, Mélenchon reaches the second round, with between 15.5% and 17% of voting intentions. He is overtaken by former prime minister Edouard Philippe only when the latter is the sole candidate of the centrist bloc, that is, in the absence of Gabriel Attal, another former centrist prime minister who has announced his candidacy.
With such ‘negative’ feelings and a ‘demand for radicalism’ that has never been ‘so strong’, France ‘ticks many of the boxes that predispose it to a populist change’, Ipsos executive director Brice Teinturier told Le Monde, while highlighting the ‘harmful effect’ of the 2024 dissolution.
However, ‘although a populist culture is spreading increasingly across the country, change does not appear inevitable’, he believes. But this situation ‘forces traditional candidates to propose radical measures’, which fuels the ‘normalisation of populism in France’ and ‘weakens supporters of traditional representative democracy’, he explained.
The poll was conducted online between 3 and 9 September on a sample of 13,060 French people registered on the electoral rolls, using the quota method. The margin of error is between 0.2 and 0.9 percentage points.
AGERPRES
