Over the past few weeks I have been sort of following the French elections. The coverage in the U.S. was pretty scant until the last few days. But throughout the election season I would rank, from most covered to least covered, the coverage of the campaigns of the various candidates in the American news sources I read roughly as follows:
- Marie LePen (far right)
- Éric Zammour (really far right)
- Emmanuel Macron (center-right)*
And that's it. None of the 9 (or so) other candidates got any coverage over here at all. The might be mentioned en masse in a single paragraph far down into an article about the campaign. But they were not presented as a serious candidate, and no one other than those three ever got a single article that focused exclusively on their campaign.
Here are the actual results of yesterday's election, at least for the candidates that got more than 5% of the vote:
Macron: 27.84%LePen: 23.15%Mélenchon 21.95%Zemmour 7.07%
Wait, who is that Mélenchon guy? It looks like he came really close to making it to the run off. He was only 1.2% behind LePen, a much narrower gap than the well-covered Marcon-LePen gap. And Mélenchon got three times the votes as Zemmour.
I have been trying to find coverage in American sources of Jean-Luc Mélenchon (the leftist candidate) for the last few weeks because it seemed like that's who all of my friends in France were posting about on social media. But there was essentially zero coverage of him in the U.S. Meanwhile, the U.S. media ran a ton of pieces about Zemmour, who ended up being nothing more than a single-digit percentage vote getter. Even in last weeks of the campaign when Mélenchon was surging in the polls (as reported by British sources), the American press just ignored it. I guess it didn't fit in the existing narrative of a French electorate that is split between center-right and far-right. That narrative isn't wrong (Macron, LePen, and Zemmour got more than 50% of the total votes), but it ignores a large swath of other French voters. It also ignored the small-but-real chance that Mélenchon could have reached the run-off with Macron (look how close he came!) I honestly don't know how that would play out in a general election.
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*Note: because Marcon is the incumbent I am not counting all the articles about what he did as president. There have been a lot of them lately, mostly centered on Marcon's attempts to mediate an end of the War in Ukraine. But I did not count those articles because they were not focused on the presidential campaign. If I did count everything about Macron he would be #1 on this list.
