Abstention, (more than ever) idiot trap!

Look, if that’s the case for you on the other side of the station, sorry, you’re going to get yelled at!

Because for two days, we have been hearing, we have been reading that the 2024 vintage of the Europeans was good, very good even. With more than 51% of those registered who did their duty, the highest level of participation in this election in 30 years, even better than in the last legislative elections…

Except that I, this morning, am not looking at the glass half full, but at the urn half empty!

What do you mean ?

Almost half of French men and women of voting age had a swimming pool, angling, or were simply lazy on Sunday…

A laziness difficult to justify, for a single round election, and with such a wide choice, 38 lists (a record). The problem is that the laziness of some mechanically overrepresents others, those who make the effort to vote and who don’t necessarily think like you!

This is the curse of democracies corrupted by populism: the less democrats use their freedom to vote, for which our ancestors sacrificed their lives (from 1789 to the Resistance), the more you allow the Republic to be “trolled”!

And what is the profile of those who avoided the polls on Sunday?

Ipsos put them under the scanner: 60% are under 35, for whom – and this is the most cited reason – the European election changes nothing in their daily life.

Two comments: it’s sad to hear this after 3 months of campaign where we saw that there was Europe in our vaccines, our plates, and in the thermal or electric engine of our cars.

Even sadder when we know the number of countries that would like to join this club of 27, I am thinking of the Georgians.

Drying out the Europeans is no better than the empty seats we saw in the Assembly on Friday, when Volodymyr Zelensky came to ask for our help to stand up to Putin! What a shame for the RN and LFI deputies who didn’t even have the courtesy to listen to him.

Can the situation change for the legislative elections of June 30 and July 7?

It’s a double-edged sword. Who says stake, says participation. Provided that there is no confusion, that the alliances and programs are intelligible. However, achieving this clarity in less than 19 days is quite a challenge for the deputies who are running or representing themselves.

And if we model the photo of the European elections on the next elections, then it is the RN which will win the differential abstention competition.

The side that mobilizes its people the most wins. Today, it is the RN electorate which is the most faithful to its 2022 vote. 90% of Marine Le Pen’s voters cast a ballot for Jordan Bardella’s list.

Faced with such a disciplined vote, any abstention is paid for in cash. A lesson that applies as much to Emmanuel Macron’s central bloc as to the neo-Popular Front bloc currently being reconstituted on the left.

Abstention is the first choice of those who let others choose for them. There are proxies, even digital ones now, against this “idiot trap”!