Presidential Election 2022: Forces and Weaknesses of Mélenchon Dynamics

The candidate of France Insouchaise is experiencing a clear progression, clearly the other competitors on the left. But it remains confronted with three problems: Roussel, its own image and the war in Ukraine.

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Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the return. Since the beginning of September, the candidate of France unsuitable (LFI) swelled between 8% and 9% of the voting intentions; It now reaches 12% and its progression of three points is one of the events of this wave of the electoral panel. Better, the gap that separated it from a qualification for the second round was eight points in October 2021, it is now 2.5 points. Can we conclude that what was impossible is no more than imobbable?

To understand what is going to happen, we can be content with a subjective analysis. Jean-Luc Mélenchon makes a good country: the tone is calm, the bottom is dense, the means are innovative. Exactly as in 2017 – to the point of forgetting a lot of French the excesses over the last five years. The panel adds mostly two more objective elements. It makes it possible to understand, on the one hand, the motivations of its constituents: compared to other candidates, it is the ideological proximity (70%) and not personal trust (17%) which explains their choice – for voters of Emmanuel Macron, responses are almost reversed (32% and 55%).

The panel allows you to know, on the other hand, the origin of its new voters. The progression of Jean-Luc Mélenchon explains little by the mobilization of new voters (+ 0.5 points); It is mainly explained by the change of voters who were already mobilized but said before wanted to vote for Christiane Taubira (+ 1 point) or Yannick Jadot (+ 0.5). In total, the sociology of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s electorate is in many ways balanced: the scores are close to the workers and the senior executives, in the rural world and in the agglomerations, between the holders of a bac + 3 / + 4 and those who do not have a diploma.

Actual potentialities

What can he hope in recent weeks of campaign – starting, do not forget, from a lower score of four points to the one he gathered at the same period in 2017? Its dynamic is not exempt from fragility. His constituents are much less safe than those of the candidates who predict him. Barely half of them declare that their choice is final; The score is around 80% for those of Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour. And the examination of the “second choices” – “for whom would you vote if you were to not vote for your candidate?” – Shows that he has few potential reserves among those who say today to be certain to go vote without their choice is definitive: the main ones are at Fabien Roussel and Yannick Jadot but their addition is less than two points …

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/Media reports.