How to explain the abstention? After a presidential election that almost went down in history with 28.01% in the second round, the first round of legislative elections was a record from this point of view. Less than one in two French people came last Sunday to slip their ballot into the ballot box. And two days before the second round, despite numerous appeals from politicians on all sides, there is no guarantee that more potential voters will come. But how to explain such a phenomenon which seems unstoppable, as it grows with each election?
A “new equation of protest”
This is the question to which Laurence de Nervaux, director of the Think Tank “Common Destinies”, and co-author of a survey entitled “In the minds of abstentionists” sought to answer, by going to meet many people who have chosen not to express themselves electorally. For her, it is necessary to go beyond the stereotype of the abstainer: a young person not very qualified who lives in suburbs. “The common point between all these people is that they are in what has been called ‘a new equation of protest'”, reports Laurence de Nervaux at the microphone of Europe 1. In detail, this equation “combines a very deep uncertainty about the future, a feeling of daily complexity, and more broadly a lack of readability, a feeling of helplessness”.
Complex factors which, if they can constitute a starting point, are not an explanation of abstention, since “these are things that people who vote can also criticize, share, experience”. The disconnect is therefore to be found on the side of a “very deep feeling of uncertainty, of a very deep mistrust, and this lack of visibility”, she affirms, while specifying that “the abstainers as a whole are not totally indifferent to politics”.
“Rethinking education for democracy”
And if we tend to have a “short-term” vision to fight against abstention, Laurence de Nervaux, argues that the fight against abstention goes above all through substantive issues. “We have to work on this crisis of confidence in politics, but also in the media.” Concretely, according to the specialist, this involves “rethinking an education for democracy that includes media education”.