Slowly, but surely, he is gaining ground. Raphaël Glucksmann, head of the Place public-PS list for the European elections on June 9, is gaining ground on Valérie Hayer. With respectively 15% and 14.5% of voting intentions, the lists of the presidential majority and PS-Place publique have never been “so close” note the authors of the Toluna Harris interactive barometer for RTL, M6 and Challenge published on May 22 i. As for the National Rally candidate, he is not worried since he is well in the lead with more than 30% of the voting intentions.
The match is therefore mainly played for second place. And the passing of arms over Ukraine between the champion of the Macronist camp and the founder of Place publique during the debate between candidates for the European elections organized by LCI on May 21 is enough to shake up the situation. During this televised exchange, the Renaissance candidate in fact criticized the supporters of her rival, the socialist deputies, for not having voted in favor of the military programming law (allowing more aid to be deployed to Ukraine in particular ). However, they did vote for this law, as several of them highlighted on social networks. Another subject could be likely to divide opinion: Raphaël Glucksmann recently pleaded in favor of the recognition of the Palestinian state, following the Spanish, Irish and Norwegian announcements.
We will therefore have to wait for the next bursts of opinion polls, carried out after this debate and the latest positions of the candidates, to know if this will have been favorable to the former advisor to the Georgian president Mikhail Sakaachvili.
In the meantime, its trajectory has shown constant progression since the start of the year. A Toluna Harris Interactive barometer for Challenge on January 16 gave it 11% of voting intentions, compared to 28% for the RN and 19% for Renaissance. A few weeks later, on March 21, the list led by Raphaël Glucksmann obtained 13% of voting intentions according to the same organization.
An infographic produced by the Huffington Post based on a compilation of the main opinion studies on the European elections allows us to visualize the dropout. It was thus from the month of March that the Glusckmann candidacy began to break through, with an increasingly favorable opinion towards it, while the list led by Valérie Hayer lost points. The two are now neck and neck.
Given this dynamic, Olivier Faure, the first secretary of the PS, questioned in a letter to Arcom the upcoming holding of a debate between Jordan Bardella and Prime Minister Gabriel Attal. As for the MEP excluded from this exchange, he himself identified a “false duel” which “invisibilizes” the Renaissance candidate, during an interview on France 3.
On social networks – a much less specific indicator of course but which gives another idea of the situation – the former journalist stands out as the most popular candidate of the leading trio on Instagram (Meta group) with 761,000 subscribers in May, compared to 528,000 at Jordan Bardella – who on the other hand has almost 100,000 more subscribers on X and – and less than 11,000 “followers” at Valérie Hayer. As for Tik Tok, the RN candidate’s favorite playground where he has 1.2 million subscribers, very popular with young people, is not to the taste of Raphaël Glucksmann who closed his account.