This Sunday’s French presidential runoff will set the staunch neoliberal Emmanuel Macron against the far-right Marine Le Pen. In the April 10 first round, they each took about a quarter of the vote (27.4 and 23.1 percent, respectively); to win the second round, they both need to attract broader support, particularly among the Left’s electorate. While its top candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon narrowly failed to make the runoff, his impressive 22 percent score boosted the overall vote for the Left (32 percent) and put him in a strategic position for the next stage of the race. Unlike the defeated soft-left parties (Greens and Socialists), Mélenchon did not endorse Macron, though he did strongly emphasize that none of his voters should back Le Pen.

Mainstream media were quick to dismiss Mélenchon’s position as trivializing the far-right threat. But he is aware that endorsing Macron would be highly divisive among his own electorate. An online vote among the supporters of Union Populaire — the movement that supported his campaign — confirmed the split. It saw two-thirds of the 215,000 participants opt for a blank (or null) vote or for abstention (respectively 37.6 percent and 29 percent), while only one-third (33.4 percent) backed a vote for the incumbent; the movement did not even consider endorsing Le Pen. Center-left daily Le Monde commented that “among Mélenchon’s supporters, the Macron ballot is in the minority for the second round.”

If the paper expressed surprise, this trend is not new. Already in 2017, for the first time in the history of French presidential elections, abstention rose between the two rounds (by 1.6 million votes), and the number of blank and void votes (i.e., casting a ballot to express one’s rejection of both candidates) jumped from 960,000 to over 4 million. According to estimates, between 24 percent and 36 percent of Mélenchon’s voters abstained in that runoff, with 17 percent opting for a blank or null ballot; among voters for then Socialist/Green candidate Benoît Hamon, abstention was between 17 and 24 percent and the blank or null vote 10 percent. A small but not negligible minority of the left-wing vote even went to Le Pen — between 7 and 19 percent of Mélenchon’s electorate, according to various polls.