There are still elected officials to convince. Eric Zemmour said, Thursday morning on Europe 1, have three hundred sponsorships out of the five hundred required to validate their candidacy for the presidential election. He was especially angry against the fact that the names of the sponsors of candidates are public, judging that this provision dissuades some from supporting him. “The names should no longer mean anything”, he maintained. Eric Zemmour also appealed to the president of the Association of Mayors of France, David Lisnard, suggesting that he should “Give the signatures to all the candidates who are at least 5 or 8% in the polls”.
“I don’t just think of myself, Zemmour continued. I know that Marine Le Pen also has trouble getting her signatures, when she already has two hundred or three hundred elected. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, too, is struggling. “ The National Rally, like the Front National before it, regularly calls into question the sponsorship system. In November 2021, Marine Le Pen also had requested the anonymity of the sponsors.
As for Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s campaign team, she says, on the candidate’s website, “Face many obstacles” in the sponsorship process. “Some people pass instructions to try to trip us up at this stage, it’s a democratic problem. We therefore appeal to the independence of mind of the mayors and their republican conscience. “
Reform proposals
According to Eric Zemmour, “There was a perversion of the original law by François Hollande in the previous mandate. He made public the names of the mayors. It is a democratic scandal ”. This attack on the former socialist president is not entirely founded. Admittedly, since 2016, all the names of the sponsors have been published by the Constitutional Council, as they are collected by the candidates. But, during the previous elections, these sponsors were also partly known, since five hundred names were drawn among all the sponsorships received by the candidates – the Official newspaper gives the trace, for example, for the elections of 2012 or from 2007. As early as 1974, the Constitutional Council requested that the names of all the sponsors are known.
Established in 1962, the sponsorship system only required a hundred supporters of elected officials to validate a presidential candidacy. The threshold rose to five hundred in 1976, to deter too fragile candidates. In 2007, a committee chaired by Edouard Balladur had proposed, as an alternative solution, the secret ballot of a college of one hundred thousand elected officials. In 2012, a commission, led by Lionel Jospin, suggested replacing the rule of five hundred elected by the sponsorship of 150,000 citizens. Finally, in October 2020, a Law proposition (rejected) mixed sponsorship of elected officials and citizen sponsorship. The rapporteur for this text at the Assembly was Jean-Luc Mélenchon.