France

Presidential election : democracy outraged

- 4:04 pm
Election présidentielle 2022

Election présidentielle 2022

What if Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and others did not obtain the 500 sponsorships required to be candidates for the Élysée ? What would happen ?

This presidential election of 2022 is a real insult to democracy. Less than 60 days before the first round, on April 10, 2022, the President of the Republic is openly campaigning even though he is still not officially a candidate for his own succession. “We’ll have to think about it at some point,” said Emmanuel Macron ironically.
This makes his opponents howl. “We have a President of the Republic who uses public funds to make his campaign. We are clearly on the embezzlement of public funds,” bluntly accuses Christian Jacob, president of the Republicans. By specifying that he wrote to the national commission of campaign accounts (CNCCFP) to denounce this abnormal situation.

The publicity of sponsorships

This is not the only anomaly of this election. We know that to be a candidate for the presidential election, it is necessary to collect at least 500 sponsorships from at least 30 departments, without more than 10% of them coming from the same department. These sponsorships must arrive at the Constitutional Council before March 4, 2022 at 6 pm. Macron, Pécresse and Hidalgo have largely obtained the 500 signatures that qualify them for the first round. But not the others.
The rule of sponsorship is intended to avoid fantasy candidacies. The 1976 reform raised the number of sponsorships from 100 to 500. The publicity of sponsorships, provided for by the organic law of April 25, 2016 on “the modernization of the rules applicable to the presidential election” imposed on the Constitutional Council to ensure the full publicity of the authors of presentations of the candidates. This poses a problem. Because the 42,000 or so elected officials (mayors, deputies, senators…) who can support a candidate are reluctant to see their name (and that of their commune) associated with such and such a candidate classified either too far to the right or too far to the left.

Polls and sponsorships

Obviously, the candidates who do not have a sufficiently broad electoral base are struggling, regardless of their score in the polls.
At the time of writing, Emmanuel Macron, the president not yet a candidate, is credited with 26% of voting intentions in the first round according to an Elabe poll for l’Express and BFM-TV. He has already obtained 926 sponsorships. He is ahead of Marine Le Pen credited with 15.5% of voting intentions. But she has only obtained 139 sponsorships. Valérie Pécresse is given at 15% (but she is leading the race with 939 sponsorships). Eric Zemmour is at 13% in this poll (149 sponsorships). Jean-Luc Mélenchon is at 10% of voting intentions (224 sponsorships).
All the other candidates, Hidalgo, Jadot, Roussel, Arthaud, Dupont-Aignan, Poutou and Taubira are under the 5% mark and none of them has obtained enough sponsorships to run.

Abstention or chaos

Can we imagine that Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour and Jean-Luc Mélenchon will not be able to run for the elections of April 10 and 24, 2022 because of a lack of sponsors ?
Two scenarios may then arise.

  • Either a large number of voters will refuse to participate in this democratic buffoonery and the elected president will not have a majority in the assembly (the legislative elections take place in the wake). It will be quickly the chaos.
  • Either the French will not accept the verdict of the ballot box and risk to attack the new tenant of the Elysée.In both cases, the outraged democracy will lead to a period of great instability. The presidential candidates have less than a month to collect sponsorships. But can they achieve in three weeks what they have failed to do so far ?

France,