Behind the figure – This figure, advanced by Jean -Luc Mélenchon, is exaggerated. But it is true that the coalition of the left has lost in many very tight duels.
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Sometimes “fate is teasing”, writes Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the blog post commenting on the results of the legislative elections . The leader of the new Ecological and Social People’s Popular Union (Nuts) nourishes regrets, saying that he “missed a total of sixteen thousand votes in the country between the various constituencies to have a relative majority before the macronists”.
After having succeeded in having four deputies elected in the first round of the legislative elections, the clip was present in nearly 400 constituencies in the second round, which fed large hopes … which were showered by the result of the ballot boxes: the Coalition on the left has lost in 249 of them (including 34 against the RN and 182 against together!).
Where does this figure come from?
The Insoumise France campaign team specified that this figure came from a widely broadcast message on Twitter . The author of the tweet ensures that he would have missed precisely 16,504 votes to the Nuts to obtain the majority relating to the overall place. With these few thousand additional bulletins, leftist training could have won many very tight duels, and obtain 199 seats, while together! would have mechanically lowered its scoring at 197 seats and the National Rally (RN) at 80 seats. Contacted, the author of this calculation did not respond to our requests concerning his methodology.
Why it’s exaggerated
We tried to redo these calculations, by ordering the list the constituencies in which the NUPS lost, of the smallest gap of voice (sometimes only 4 bulletins) to the greatest. If, in a fiction scenario, we reversed the results of the duels to give the seats lost to the left formation, we could, after 58 additional victories, lead to a relative majority of 200 seats for the Nutps, 198 For together! and 80 for the rn.
To determine the number of votes required, in each district, to achieve this relative majority, we have retained two possibilities:
- Either we start from the hypothesis that the missing voices were abstentionists, and it is therefore enough to take the current gap between the two candidates and then add a voice to obtain the majority. For example in the 1st district of Calvados, Philippe Le Vigoureux (ensemble!), Won with 200 votes in advance. If we added virtually 201 votes to her opponent, Emma Take (Noups), she would win. In this scenario, we calculated that it was missing 51,507 votes with the clouds to obtain the relative majority;
- It is estimated that participation remains the same, but that voters could have voted differently. In this case, we do a calculation by dividing the current gap by two. In this same constituency of Calvados, it would have been enough of 101 voters who vote Natps rather than together! so that Emma scorage prevails. With this postulate, it only takes 27,745 bulletins to switch the majority.
In both cases, a figure greater than 16,504 votes mentioned by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. But, whatever the method chosen, out of the 20.7 million votes cast in the second round of the legislative elections, the number of votes which “lack” in the cloud remains very low, between 0.13 and 0.25 % of the total .
To go further, we also calculated that 393,344 votes would have been necessary for the Nutples to obtain the absolute majority of 289 seats in the National Assembly. In this configuration, the group together! would only have had 133 seats and 63 for the RN.