The challenge confronting France's newly re-elected president is how to give his second-round voters valid reasons to believe that he has listened to them. Fortunately, an opening on three related issues is possible.
French President Emmanuel Macron,
re-elected with 58% of the vote, received 85% of Parisians’ votes and
three-quarters of those of Seine-Saint-Denis, a working-class district
at the outskirts of the capital where 30% of the population is foreign-born.
But in the Somme district, where Macron was raised, his far-right
challenger, Marine Le Pen, was ahead, and in the Pas-de-Calais, where
Macron has a home, she got 58%. In this deeply divided country, there
seems to be no better predictor of the vote than distance to
metropolitan centers.
Occupational and educational (rather than
income) cleavages matter, too. Two-thirds of French workers went for Le
Pen and three-quarters of its managers for Macron, according to
polling by Ipsos, while three-quarters of university graduates went for Macron, against one quarter for Le Pen.
Sociological determinants are compounded by location. France is fast
becoming a country where people cluster near their peers. Between 2008
and 2018, the share of managers and high-skill workers in cities like
Paris, Bordeaux, or Lyon has
increased by four or five percentage points, while lower-middle-class and working-class residents moved out.
At a deeper, individual level, satisfaction with one’s life was a key
determinant of the vote. Some 80% of those dissatisfied with their life
voted for Le Pen.
As documented
by Yann Algan of HEC Paris business school and his colleagues, social
trust or the lack of it significantly influences voters’ choices. These
findings seem terribly familiar. As in the United States, how much you
studied and where you live seems to determine for whom you vote, and
support for far-right candidates is becoming entrenched among
working-class voters. But to stop here would be too simple, because the
biggest shock in this election was not the Macron-Le Pen run-off, which
was expected, but the devastation of the traditional parties that
occurred in the first round. Whereas their candidates jointly gained 56%
of the vote in 2012, they received only 6.5% of it ten years later.
Among major European countries, only Italy has experienced such an
overhaul of the political landscape in recent years....
more at Project Syndicate
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