Voting is not happening in France alone – there are about 2.5 million French people living abroad and they are also taking part in the election.
I am one of them and earlier I went to vote at the lycée in the north-west London suburb of Wembley – one of several French high schools in London – which serves as a voting centre.
It seemed less busy than five years ago for the last election, but many people are currently away for the Easter holidays (and may have arranged to vote by proxy – more than a million people had registered to do so by early April.)
The centre was well organised and people were getting through quickly. So it’s hard to say whether this was because of a low turnout or just down to efficient organisation on the day.
Of the 12 candidates on ballot papers today, these are the six main challengers. They are Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen, Valerie Pecresse, Jean-Luc Melench, Eric Zemmour and Yannick Jadoc.
There has been a lot of coverage of Macron and Le Pen as the incumbent and main challenger respectively.
But the field also includes centre-right Pécresse, strongly left-wing Mélenchon, far-right Zemmour and Jadot for the Greens.
Meanwhile, after nine hours of voting, election officials have revealed that turnout is 65%, that’s well down on recent elections. Five years ago it was 69.42%.
We already had a sense of a low turnout earlier, when turnout was given as 25.48%, the lowest since 2002. Some areas including Corsica and parts of Paris are reporting very low turnouts little higher than 50%.
It’s not been low across the country. Areas including in the Loire valley and the Dordogne are well over 70% – and we’ve been getting reports of traffic jams in some of the big cities.
French election turnouts are traditionally high: the first-round turnout in 2017 was 77.77%.
One reason for the lower turnout is that the campaign kicked in very late, partly because of the Covid pandemic and more recently the Russian war in Ukraine. But also there’s a feeling of widespread apathy, with voters telling us anecdotally that they aren’t very impressed by any of the candidates.
And bear in mind that one opinion poll suggested 37% of voters were undecided less than a week before the election.
