That prospect hadn’t happened since last October. After a double crossing of the curves, Éric Zemmour manages to climb to the second round according to the daily Ifop/Paris Match poll.
According to the institute, after having already outstripped Valérie Pécresse at the start of the week (Editor’s note, Tuesday), Éric Zemmour also managed to overtake the candidate of the RN on the wire. With 16.5% of voting intentions (+ 0.5 points in one day), the Reconquest candidate therefore mechanically manages to climb into a position to reach the second round by overtaking for the first time the MP for Pas- de-Calais (16%, -0.5 points). He had never reached such a score in this Ifop survey, even this fall, when he was familiar with the front door of the second round. In contrast, that was the case in another Harris Interactive poll for Challenges this time around.
The ex-journalist recorded, with an increase of 1.5 points in one week and 4.5 points in one month, the strongest electoral momentum since the beginning of the year, still according to this survey. Hard to know if it is the rallies coming mainly from the Lepenist ranks or the criticism of Valérie Pécresse after her meeting last weekend which benefits the “Z”.
Inverted dynamic?
Eric Zemmour’s lead this Friday over his direct competitors remains symbolic and statistically very narrow (the difference between the three candidates corresponds to the margins of error of the daily survey), the dynamics of the Reconquest candidate seem obvious. For Ifop, this dynamic seems to be due, for the time being, more to a phenomenon of communicating vessels with the Lepenist electorate – from which it captures 29% of former voters in 2017 (+ 4 points in one week) – than to a demobilization of Valérie Pécresse’s traditional right-wing electorate.
The president of the Île-de-France region, now relegated to virtual fourth place in this race in the second round, comes out weakened by this sequence, which no longer allows her to claim to be the “useful vote” of the rights against Emanuel Macron. The latter still largely dominates the voting intentions in the first round with a score of 25%.