Nearly 15.6 million viewers watched the debate between the two rounds of the presidential election on all the channels that broadcast it on Wednesday evening, the worst audience for this format since its creation in 1974, according to the figures from Médiamétrie transmitted on Thursday.
Nearly 15.6 million viewers watched the debate between the two rounds of the presidential election on all the channels that broadcast it on Wednesday evening, the worst audience for this format since its creation in 1974, according to the figures from Médiamétrie transmitted on Thursday. In 2017, nearly 16.5 million viewers had followed the debate which already opposed Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron. A score lower than those of 2012 and 2007, but close to that of the debate between Lionel Jospin and Jacques Chirac in 1995 and its 16.8 million viewers.
The first debate between two rounds, which opposed Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterrand on May 10, 1974, had gathered around 25 million viewers, according to estimates. “It’s a very rigid format that has aged a lot,” commented to AFP Alexis Lévrier, media historian at the University of Reims. “It has changed very little since its creation with journalists almost reduced to the function of stopwatches”, he added, to explain the lower appetite of viewers. This year, in addition to TF1 and France 2, organizing channels, news channels and parliamentary channels also broadcast it. In total, the debate totaled an audience share of 68.3%, all channels combined.
Read also: What have previous inter-round debates been like?
1.7 million tweets during the show
TF1 and France 2 alone gathered 14.05 million viewers (61.4% audience share), a score also lower than in 2017 (15.1 million then). As during the 2017 debate, TF1 attracted more people (7.4 million, 32.4% audience share), compared to France 2 (6.6 million, 29% PDA). The debate sparked 1.7 million tweets during the show and 2.5 million over the past 24 hours, social media monitoring platform Visibrain told AFP.
The four streamers who broadcast the debate on their Twitch channels totaled 278,000 spectators, at the peak of the cumulative audience (around 10:00 p.m.), according to the specialized data site Twitch Tracker. After months of vagueness around the broadcast of television programs on the live platform, four successful streamers, Samuel Etienne, Jean Massiet, HugoDécrypte and Sardoche, announced in mid-April that they had acquired the rights to broadcast the debate.
Read also : Debate between the Macron/Le Pen rounds: what to remember