Marine Le Pen faces less rejection than rivals, study finds ahead of French presidential election

Marine Le Pen is less rejected by French voters than her competitors, according to a study examining the political landscape ahead of the next presidential election. Its broader conclusion is unsettling for anyone expecting the contest to be driven mainly by enthusiasm: rejection may matter more than support.

Published by polling institute Cluster17 and the moderate-left Terra Nova think tank, the study maps French voters through 16 “value systems.” The groups include multiculturalists, moderates, anti-welfare voters, apolitical citizens, traditionalists, sociopatriots and refuseniks.

The research challenges the idea that the decline of the traditional left-right divide has left France with an electorate that is fragmented, unstable and impossible to predict. Instead, Jean-Yves Dormagen, Cluster17’s president, describes voters as more structured than that picture suggests.

French voters, Dormagen argues, remain largely “attached to an identifiable political universe.” Their choices are less directly explained by a simple left-right position or formal party affiliation than before. Increasingly, the study says, voting behavior reflects membership in a particular value system.

That framework offers a different way to read the coming presidential race. France’s political field is multipolar, but the study suggests its voters still occupy recognizable camps. The contest could therefore turn less on a candidate’s ability to generate broad approval than on which candidate voters reject least.

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attached to an identifiable political universe