Strategic Withdrawals and RN in the 2024 French Election

Created on: 2024/07/13

When I was following the news of the elections in France, I was surprised by the big discrepancy between the results of the first and second round of voting.

In the first round the party of Marine le Pen and their allies came in first place in 296 out of the 577 constituencies, which would give them an absolute majority in the National Assembly.

Yet, after the second round they only managed to secure 142 seats, which is less than half. So, what happened here? It turns out that over 200 candidates of the other parties strategically withdrew their candidacy inbetween the first and second round. In many places where the vote was split roughly between three parties, so when two of those three formed a block they prevented the Rassemblement National from gaining a majority. It seems this strategy has been extremely effective.

I was curious to see this effect in more detail, which I attempted to do with this visualization. Each circle represents a constituency where RN had a majority in the first round. The first round results are shown in the outer circle, with the arrow indicating the party that withdrew their candidate between the first and second round.

The inner circle shows the voting of the second round, while the center point shows the actual winner of the seat.

Remember, that this figure only shows the constituencies where RN gained a majority in the first round. So without interference, most of the circles should have remained blue. Also, this means that roughly half of the total 577 seats are not represented in this diagram.