As France gets ready for Sunday night’s final round of voting in the presidential elections, where the centrist candidate, Emmanuel Macron faces off against the far right National Front’s Marine Le Pen, not everyone feels compelled to make a choice between the two.
An internal poll conducted by La France Insoumise, a quasi-formal organization that has formed around far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melanchon, showed the majority of respondents would not vote for Mr. Macron. Over 36% of the 240,000 respondents supported casting a blank vote on Sunday, about 29 % said they would abstain. Just under 35% said they would vote for Macron. The poll was set up to gauge opinion and is non-binding on Insoumise members. Mr. Melenchon was knocked out of the first round of presidential elections on April 23, after he finished fifth with just over 7 million votes, a 19.6% vote share.
Mr. Melenchon himself made it clear that he would not be voting for Ms. Le Pen.
On Sunday, Mr. Melenchon had said that Mr. Macron could make a “gesture” to his camp by not taking forward labour law reforms, a request Mr. Macron said he would not accede to as it would be a betrayal of his own supporters.
Writing in Le Monde , defeated socialist candidate, Benoit Hamon said he would make an obvious but difficult choice on May 7 and vote for Mr. Macron. Mr. Hamon appealed to the “collective intelligence” and “individual conscience” of citizens, especially on the left, to not allow the extreme right a “terrible victory”.
Mr. Macron’s camp criticized the Insoumise position. “You can disagree with Emmanuel Macron’s policies and you can disagree on the perceptions of the personality of Emmanuel Macron but you cannot, having the choice between one democrat and one fascist, [say] I will not go out and vote. It’s really a shame,” Christian Dargnat, a key member of En Marche!, told The Hindu on Tuesday.
“There has been some confusion about what the online consultation expressed,” Olivier Tonneau, a University of Cambridge academic and member of La France Insoumise said, citing the small sample size of the Insoumise online consultation. Citing polls, such as the Elabe poll conducted after the first round of voting on April 23, Mr. Tonneau said that two thirds of those who voted for Mr. Melenchon in the first round would vote for Mr. Macron in the second round. “ So there is a discrepancy between the most militant fringe of the Insoumise and the broad number of Melechon voters…the risk Melenchon is taking[ in not directing voters to vote for Mr. Macron] is extremely slight.”
In what will be their first and last one on one exchange, the two candidates will have face each other in a televised debate on Wednesday night Paris time. Ms. Le Pen is trailing behind Mr. Macron by about 18-20% according to polls, a gap she is not expected to make up by Sunday.
