Several polls published around ten days ago indicate that part of Emmanuel Macron’s 2022 electorate is now considering voting for Marine Le Pen in the first round of France’s next presidential election. The shift comes five and a half months before the vote and remains limited in scale, but analysts say it is far from insignificant.
The movement is notable because Macron and Le Pen voters have faced each other in the last two presidential runoffs. Frédéric Dabi, director general of Ifop’s opinion division, described the two electorates as traditionally “very antagonistic.” In his view, the trend illustrates how political boundaries have become more fluid as France’s party system has been reshaped since 2017 and the traditional left-right divide has weakened.
Bruno Cautrès, a CNRS researcher at Cevipof, called the combination “completely improbable” in theory. Yet three recent polling barometers point in the same direction: between 16% and 19% of voters who backed Macron in 2022 would now choose Marine Le Pen, according to the figures cited in the analysis.
The findings suggest that a non-negligible part of Macron’s former base is moving toward the Rassemblement national, even though the trend does not represent a wholesale transfer of his electorate. It also highlights the difficulty of maintaining the political boundaries that once separated the president’s supporters from those of the far-right party.
Sources: Le Figaro.