'The useful vote': French presidential contenders irk rivals with tactical taboo
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Loading... - Coby Groff
- 06 Apr 2022
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Presidential campaigns offer an abundance of catch phrases, whether slogans finessed by a candidate's team to deliver maximum impact or coined spontaneously on the trail. The proclamations of presidential hopefuls bring texture to an election race and come to define a campaign – for a news cycle or forever in the history books. FRANCE 24 breaks through the language barrier to bring you the buzzwords of the 2022 French presidential race. In the spotlight: "Vote utile", the useful vote.
The topic materialises with every French presidential vote and yet nevertheless elicits a frenzy of pearl-clutching from the relevant offended adversaries: the vote utile, the appeal to cast one's ballot usefully. The idea is a compromise: Go for a tolerable candidate with the best chance at the top prize, rather than the ideal pick in a perfect world. Better to win vaguely contented than to lose in a blaze of glory on stubborn principle.
But the prospect of such tactical voting is so frowned upon in France, particularly on the left, that the candidate with the most to gain from it in the 2022 presidential race, far-leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has dodged that loaded phrase. Instead, he favours "le vote efficace", the efficient vote.
"I don't like the term 'useful vote'," Mélenchon demurred in a February tweet thanking former Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal for controversially endorsing the La France Insoumise party candidate as the only sound tactical choice on the left. "The useless vote doesn't exist. Everyone deploys a conviction and deposits a ballot with the country's best interest in mind," said the 70-year-old.
But the leftist adversaries that Mélenchon is offending – namely Socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo, French Communist Party (PCF) candidate Fabien Roussel and Greens candidate Yannick Jadot – are pointedly not falling for his semantic antics. Mélenchon does want a useful vote, the rivals say, and they won't stand for it. Jadot last week deemed "a useful or efficient vote" a "mirage", while Hidalgo on Sunday urged lapsed Socialists to "come back to your first family", even as she polls at under 2 percent.
Where does the term come from?
Candidates' entreaties to vote tactically have been a mainstay of French politics at least since the 2002 presidential election's historic shocker: Back then, for the very first time, a far-right candidate, the grizzled rabble-rouser Jean-Marie Le Pen, insinuated himself into the presidential run-off with less than 17 percent of the vote, beating out the much-heralded Socialist Party candidate Lionel Jospin, much to the surprise of all concerned. Read More...
