![]() When the candidates did discuss issues related to science, it tended to be environmental policy. Le Pen election win would be disastrous for research, France and EuropeĪndreotti and Lemaire are disappointed with the lack of detail on science in the candidates’ manifestos. “I’m convinced the vast majority of us will overwhelmingly vote for Macron even if we don’t support him in our hearts,” he says. Philippe Askenazy, an economist and senior researcher at the French national research agency CNRS, expects that most academics will once again lend their vote to Macron in the forthcoming second round. Many scientists are thought to have voted for Macron back in 2017, which analysts attributed to an opposition to Le Pen’s politics rather than any keenness for Macron. “Without even considering the absence of academia and research in the debates, this whole presidential campaign is already vacuous,” says Bruno Andreotti, a physicist at Paris City University. “The near complete absence of science and research from the debates is quite striking,” says Patrick Lemaire, president of the College of Academic Learned Societies of France in Rennes, an organization that aims to foster interdisciplinary research. That means they’ll go head-to-head in the second round, which will be held on 24 April, and one of them will be tasked with putting their campaign promises into practice by the end of this month.Īmid all the hubbub of these campaign promises, however, one subject seemed to be largely missing from the conversation: science. Macron and Le Pen came top in the first round with 27.8% and 23.1% of votes, respectively. Le Pen proposed tax cuts to ease the sting of rising inflation and said she’d hold a referendum on cutting immigration rates.įrench presidents are elected in two rounds of voting. Macron sought to position himself as a wartime leader, pledging to boost military spending. Credit: Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Gettyīefore voters in France headed to the polls on 10 April, the two front runners - incumbent centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-right challenger Marine Le Pen - saw their approval rates rise following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Įnergy independence, defence and social reforms were prominent issues on the campaign trail and in the two candidates’ manifestos, released last month. People in Lyon, France, queue to cast their vote for the first round of the French presidential election. This entry was posted in Political Science by Andrew. In France there was no mainstream political party to do this job for Marine Le Pen. Together they managed to get the 49% they needed. general election of 2016, the Republican Party needed Donald Trump’s voters, but Trump needed the Republican Party. Remember that, before being chosen as the Republican party nominee, Donald Trump had huge negatives among Republican voters, and he wasn’t so popular among Democrats either. In France, though, one of the runoff candidates came from a fringe party and the other had no traditional party ties. The two major political parties in the United States are despised but they’re the only game in town, and once things got to the runoff, almost all the partisans voted for their party’s candidate. There are lots of differences between French and American politics, but I think the key factor here is party identification. runoff, the populist nationalist and the center-left technocrat split the vote evenly, whereas in the French runoff, the center-left technocrat won two-thirds of the vote. In the United States, these candidates were named Trump, Cruz, Clinton, and Sanders, and in a four-way race (with a bunch of minor candidates splitting the remaining 15% of the vote) they might well have garnered the very same proportions as above. In the first round of the 2017 French presidential election, these four candidates received 21%, 20%, 24%, and 20%, respectively. Consider a national election with the following four major candidates, from right to left:
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