2002 French presidential election
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"In elections between only two candidates where one is mildly unpopular and the other immensely unpopular, opponents of both candidates frequently advocate a vote for the mildly unpopular candidate. For example, in the second round of the 2002 French presidential election, graffiti in Paris told people to "vote for the crook, not the fascist", vote for the lesser of two evils. The "crook" in those scribbled public messages was Jacques Chirac of Rally for the Republic, and the "fascist" was Jean-Marie le Pen of the Front National. Jacques Chirac eventually won the second round having garnered 82% of the vote." --Sholem Stein |
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The 2002 French presidential election consisted of a first round election on 21 April 2002, and a runoff election between the top two candidates (Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen) on 5 May 2002. This presidential contest attracted a greater than usual amount of international attention because of far-right candidate Le Pen's unexpected appearance in the runoff election.
Chirac ran for a second term, emphasising a strong economy (mostly unaffected by downturns in Germany and the USA). It was widely expected that Chirac and Lionel Jospin, the prime minister and candidate for the Socialist Party, would be the most popular candidates in the first round, and would thus go on to face each other in the runoff. However, Jospin unexpectedly finished in third place behind Le Pen. Journalists and politicians then claimed that polls had failed to predict Le Pen's second-place finish in the general election, though his strong stance could be seen in the week prior to the election. This led to serious discussions about polling techniques and the climate of French politics.
Although Le Pen's political party National Front described itself as mainstream conservative, non-partisan observers largely agreed in defining it as a far right or ultra-nationalist party. As a protest, almost all French political parties called for their supporters to vote against Le Pen, most notably the Socialists who were traditionally billed as the archrivals to Chirac's party. Chirac thus went on to win the biggest landslide in a French presidential election (greater even than that of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in 1848, the first by direct ballot), winning over 82% of the vote.
The National Front would not appear again in the second round of the French presidential election until 2017. It got 34% of the votes, almost doubling its 2002 tally, thus displacing nominees from the traditional Left & Right parties who failed to qualify for the runoff for the first time in history of the Fifth Republic. Their combined share of the vote from eligible voters, at approximately 26%, was also a historic low.
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