This week’s French regional elections take place just ten months before the April 2022 presidential contest — and many hoped that they would tell us what to expect in next year’s vote. Yet seemingly the only takeaway from Sunday’s first-round regional contests was the rock-bottom turnout, making what was already a highly uncertain electoral landscape even murkier.

More than two-thirds of the electorate abstained, a record in the Fifth Republic’s six-decade history. And for once, what should be seen as a damning indictment in any democracy worth the name appears to have shaken both politicians and the media. However, in the discussions taking place in France, we can already see a lack of reflection on the real meaning of abstention — and perhaps more importantly, on the way we talk about voting, politics, and democracy in our societies.

Let’s start with an important caveat. To demand that abstention is taken seriously into account does not mean imputing any particular political project or value. For obvious reasons, it is hard to know what the people who abstain actually believe, or whom they would turn to if they were forced to make a choice. Yet abstention is not spread equally across sociodemographic categories and, in general, the younger you are or the lower on the socioeconomic ladder, the more likely you are to abstain.