Monday, June 20, 2022

Mapping the French Election

Macron's En Marche! party has failed to win a majority in France's new National Assembly following strong performances by the left-wing alliance and the far right. The president's En Marche! won the most seats of any party in the national election. However the 245 seats won by Macron fall well short of the 289 seats needed for an overall majority in the National Assembly and far short of the 350 seats won by En Marche! and MoDem in 2017. 

Le Parisien's Five Maps to Understand the Surprising Second Round does a good job of visualizing the support for the major parties across France. Le Parisien says that the political map of France is now difficult to read and that the only geographical pattern to emerge in this year's election was the strong support for the far-right RN party in "the North, the East, the Mediterranean rim, and, more surprisingly, in New Aquitaine".

Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally party turned the 8 seats won in 2017 into 89. This means that an extreme far-right party now has a significant presence in the National Assembly. In fact RN are now the second largest party in the Assembly. Nupes, the coalition of mainstream left-wing parties with the Communists and Greens, may have won 131 seats between them but it remains a fragile coalition which may struggle to maintain a united front in opposition. And no one party in this coalition has as many seats on their own as the extreme right-wing National Rally. 

Liberation's Results of the second round of the 2022 legislative elections includes a cartogram map of the results. This cartogram colors each department by the candidate who received the most votes and scaled by the size of the population.If you click on the 'territoire' button on this cartogram you can view a more traditional map view of the results. 

If you select a political party from the list above the map you can view just the seats won by that political party. If you select Nupes you can see by the large clusters of dots on the cartogram how the left-wing coalition performed particularly well in some of France's largest cities. Conversely if you select RN you can see how the extreme far-right party, despite its success in the North-East of France has yet to make much of an impact in Paris. 

Le Monde has also released an interactive map of the National Assembly election results. On Le Monde's map each constituency is colored to show the party of the winning Deputy. If you click on an individual constituency on the map you can view the number of actual votes won by the two candidates in the 2022 National Assembly election.

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