French presidential election trends
Macro Insight
QuantCube leverages social media to examine French presidential election trend
By leveraging social media data and its proprietary NLP (Natural Language Processing) expertise, QuantCube is analyzing the current trends in the 2022 French presidential elections. The election is taking place against a difficult backdrop, including the prolonged fight against COVID-19 and political tension in Europe due to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
Is the Russia-Ukraine conflict impacting the presidential campaign?
The conflict shifted the general public’s focus to international issues at the beginning of the war. As demonstrated in Exhibit 1, QuantCube observed a drastic change in topics on Twitter when the conflict began: tweets about international topics skyrocketed on February 24 at the expense of other subjects, such as social issues. The most significant rises in “international tweets” are associated with the current president, Emmanuel Macron (+363%) and his far-right opponent, Eric Zemmour (+401%). As the current president, and with France also chairing the European Council since January 2022, Macron has been making diplomatic efforts since signs of the Russia-Ukraine crisis first appeared. Zemmour was already known before the war for his pro-Putin stance, and this links to a rise in the number of tweets about international topics associated with him. In the days after the outbreak of war, QuantCube observed a slight drop in his popularity (indicated in Exhibit 6).
QuantCube’s real-time data shows a drastic increase in tweets related to international issues right after Putin’s speech on February 21 in which he recognized the self-proclaimed "Donetsk People's Republic" (DPR) and the "Luhansk People's Republic". International issues kept dominating the scene on social media for the following three weeks, reaching a peak on February 24 corresponding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With the escalation of the conflict and the presidential elections fast approaching, we observe that international security-related tweets are decreasing to pre-war levels. On the other hand, Tweets about social issues are rising as Exhibit 2 indicates.
The role of social media in the presidential campaign - what are the candidate’s strategies?
Exhibit 3 shows that the two most active candidates on social media are Jean-Luc Mélenchon (far-left) and Eric Zemmour (far right). Their campaign teams generate more traffic on social media compared to the other candidates. The latter often calls on his audience to use certain hashtags to increase his digital visibility. On the other hand, Valérie Pécresse and Marine Le Pen are the least active on social media. More negative comments are being generated on social media about Valérie Pécresse compared to positive comments about her, while Le Pen is barely present on social media as she prefers to stick to traditional political campaign methods such as meetings and events. Emmanuel Macron generates more negative hashtags than other candidates: the incumbent President is often the target of other parties criticizing his actions as President. Hashtags against Emmanuel Macron surged around March 17th, corresponding with the news of the McKinsey scandal.
As mentioned previously, Eric Zemmour is applying an aggressive social media strategy to engage his audience against his two key opponents (Emmanuel Macron and Valérie Pécresse) as Exhibit 4 shows. Zemmour’s attacks against Valérie Pécresse (moderate-right candidate) reflect his attempt to attract right-wing sympathizers desiring tougher policies on immigration.
McKinsey Gate – is the scandal impacting Macron’s popularity?
In the last two years, the French government has drastically increased the use of management consulting companies such as McKinsey to carry out research on public-policy matters. This seems to have backfired recently due to the concern about McKinsey’s tax avoidance.
A parliamentary report was published by the opposition parties in March which accused Macron’s government of relying increasingly on consultancies to influence public policy. The report shed light on the influence of private firms on the activities of the French government. It was reported that consulting firms signed several contracts with the French government worth nearly 1 billion euros, with McKinsey securing the biggest share of the pie. Furthermore, the Senate inquiry committee found that McKinsey failed to pay French business tax for 10 years. McKinsey Gate, as many call it, could trigger unpopularity for Macron ahead of French elections, and potentially threaten Macron’s re-election campaign.
To study the impact of this scandal, QuantCube analysed more than 45 million tweets related to the French presidential elections and detected 100,000 users and over one million posts about McKinsey. As Exhibit 5 shows, QuantCube real-time data reported a significant increase in users speaking about McKinsey right after the parliamentary report was released on March 17. We see that social media users who posted McKinsey-related posts before the report publication now dominate the debate about McKinsey Gate. Additionally, they tweet 5 times more than other users about the presidential election. This data suggests that the scandal is far from over and it’s still attracting the general public’s attention. QuantCube French Elections Nowcast (Exhibit 6) currently shows a slight decrease in Macron’s popularity after the McKinsey scandal emerged. We will continue to monitor the effect of the scandal on the outcome of the French presidential campaign.
In Exhibit 6 we examine the evolution of each key candidate’s popularity since January 24th based on social media posts. Emmanuel Macron’s popularity rose sharply around February 20th, when he started to undertake diplomatic efforts for the Russia-Ukraine crisis. A further increase occurred around March 3rd, when the incumbent president officially announced his candidacy to continue his mandate. However, after the emergence of Mckinsey Gate Macron’s popularity slightly dipped. At the beginning of March Macron’s popularity stood at +45% compared to January 24th. It has now dropped to around +29%. Marine Le Pen (far right) and Jean Luc Mélenchon (far left) reported a very significant rise in popularity in the last two weeks. Despite belonging to different political parties, these two candidates have common focus on economic and social issues, which became the most relevant topics on social media after the “war effect” levelled off (exhibit 2). The popularity for Valérie Pécresse (center-right) sharply declined since the beginning of February. There seem to be two reasons for this - firstly, her mandate is very similar to Macron’s one. Secondly, she is the main target of the aggressive campaign carried out by Zemmour, who is trying to attract the vote of right-wing sympathizers desiring tougher policies on immigration. As for Eric Zemmour (far-right), our data show that he has lost ground recently due to the concern about his Pro-Russian stance at the time of the Russia-Ukraine crisis. He now seems to be struggling to regain his popularity back to pre-war levels.
Note: January 24 corresponds to the beginning of QuantCube data collection
