France: The Socialists Go Missing

Cuvee du Front National: tasting notes not available online.

While the French national football team was busy preparing to lose to Portugal in the final of the European championships this weekend, Front National (FN) leader Marine Le Pen was at an outdoor festival organized by the party’s branch in the southeastern province of Vaucluse. Special Front National-branded wines were on sale (tasting notes not available online, alas), and Le Pen spent much of the day bravely attempting to demonstrate good relations with her niece, rising party star Marion Maréchal Le-Pen, at the end of a week in which the elder Le Pen had described the younger Le Pen as a “bit rigid” and called on her to be a “team player.” This made for some deliciously awkward TV, but what was most remarkable about Le Pen’s festival outing is that it underscored — by highlighting her only real political headache, the mild rumble of her strained relationship with her niece — what a fabulous year the FN leader is having.

While different figures within the Socialist Party (PS) and the center-right Les Républicains (LR) jockey for supremacy ahead of primaries to select a candidate for next year’s presidential election, Le Pen is unchallenged as her party’s leader and polls consistently put her in the running to make the election’s second round. One of the FN leader’s central campaign pledges is to hold an in-out referendum on France’s membership of the European Union. The rest of the French political establishment is divided on the issue: the LR and PS officially oppose a referendum, while François Bayrou, the popular head of the centrist Mouvement Démocratique, opposes Frexit but is in favor of holding a referendum. But Le Pen and the FN, buoyed by the result across the Channel, have campaigned relentlessly for Frexit over the past few weeks — and the digital evidence suggests these efforts are beginning to bear fruit.

Predata’s French election signals offer a way to visualize and understand how the different candidates’ digital campaigns are faring nine months out from the first round. Each candidate’s signal includes all the material online relevant to their campaign, across Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter.

Le Pen is the French presidential campaign’s dominant digital presence nine months out from the first round.

So far, the overall picture (above) is very good for Le Pen: among the leading candidates, the FN leader is comfortably the most active digital presence today. Alain Juppé, the former Prime Minister and convicted felon now enjoying a late-career political renaissance and widely seen as the leading contender for the LR nomination, also benefits from a strong digital footprint — as does Bayrou. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy, Juppé’s chief rival for the LR nomination, has a m0re muted online presence. But the real losers are the main Socialist contenders — PM Manuel Valls attracts little attention online, while President François Hollande practically flatlines as a digital presence — reflecting, perhaps, his historically low levels of popularity.

The disappearance of Hollande as a digital entity can be viewed more clearly by comparing his online profile with that of his chief rivals for the Socialist nomination. Arnaud Montebourg, the former Economy Minister, has a far more active digital footprint than the president — as does Emmanuel Macron, his 38-year-old successor, who continues to flirt with a presidential bid under the umbrella of the “En Marche” movement he formed in April. (Macron left the PS in 2009. He has said he would like his new movement to cut across traditional political divisions, bringing in people from the left, the right and the center — not so much a plaintive “Podemos” as a unifying “Acemos”.)

For the LR, the picture is slightly neater: Juppé is the clear frontrunner, while Bruno Le Maire, a former Agriculture Minister, also has a strong digital presence. Sarkozy and his former PM François Fillon have less traction.

The LR will hold its presidential primary in November; the PS follows suit in January. As the two parties that have dominated French politics for the past half-century prepare for six months of internal wrangling to select a presidential candidate, the FN’s Marine Le Pen is already emerging as a winner in the digital arena.