Today is April 17, 2022. And we are 7 days away from the second round of the French Presidential elections.
Yesterday, Emmanuel Macron made the following statement: He said that his next Prime Minister will be directly in charge of planning for ecology.
That’s a major announcement. Few weeks or months from now, it may be looked at as a turning point of the campaign. It may be too early to say. But that announcement alone is a key component of the program offered by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s program.
Is that a path to a coalition which could bring Mélenchon as a Prime Minister? This may sound far fetched, but not that much and I think the next few days will bring further clarity.
In the meantime, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party La France Insoumise has organized an internal vote asking its members to vote about how they will vote. Of course, the party’s leadership, including Mélenchon, insists that these result should not be understood as a recommendation to the 22% voters who chose Mélenchon on Sunday 10th.
Members were asked to vote online and were offered three choices:
- a vote in favor of Macron,
- abstention
- or a blank vote.
The choice about voting for Le Pen is of course not even offered as an alternative since Mélenchon himself repeated 4 times on Sunday night last week that not a single vote should go to Le Pen.
The results just came out a few hours ago. And they reveal that 66% of the Mélenchon voters will not vote for Macron. To be more precise, out of the 215,292 participants to the online vote organized by La France Insoumise, 37.65% will vote blank or nil, 33.4% will vote for Macron and 28.96% will abstain to vote on Sunday April 24. It results from that vote that 67% of the Mélenchon voters will not vote in favor of Macron.
That’s a crucial development.
Let me know if you have questions and I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Feel free to comment.