The West Indies and Guyana voted overwhelmingly for National Rally candidate Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election, unlike the 2017 election.
At the end of the debate between the two rounds, President-candidate Emmanuel Macron regretted not having had time to discuss the overseas territories. Perhaps he anticipated bad scores, on the (bad) dynamics of the first round which had seen the candidate of rebellious France Jean-Luc Mélenchon come out on top with in particular 56% of the votes cast in Guadeloupe, 53% in Martinique or 51% in Guyana. And the second round is catastrophic for the outgoing president, largely beaten in Guadeloupe by Marine Le Pen (30.4% against 69.6%), in Martinique (39.1% against 60.9%) and in Guyana (39, 3% against 60.7%). It is even beaten in Saint-Martin and Saint-Barthélémy, with a narrower gap (44.58% against 55.42%).
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What is striking in the first place is the incredible electoral progress of the far-right party in twenty years. Jean-Marie Le Pen only won 3.85% of the vote in 2002 against Jacques Chirac in Martinique, for example. His daughter Marine had progressed in 2017 but remained far from Emmanuel Macron (24.87% of the vote in Guadeloupe, 22.45% in Martinique, 35.11% in Guyana).
Many causes
How to explain such a change five years later? There is of course the management of the health crisis which has seen the State impose (as in all of metropolitan France) periods of curfew, confinements and compulsory vaccination for caregivers, which has provoked the anger of ‘a part of the population. The Covid-19 has also highlighted the lack of hospital resources in the West Indies and the supposed “slowness” of the government to react has been very strongly criticized. There is also the chlordecone scandal, a toxic pesticide linked to the cultivation of bananas which has poisoned the soil and fueled distrust of the state. During the “great national debate”, the 1erFebruary 2019, Emmanuel Macron had collided with elected officials from overseas, explaining about chlordecone, that it should not be said “that it is carcinogenic, before the Elysée pleaded a “misunderstanding”. Last element finally, the rise of insecurity in the “districts” of the West Indian cities and the incapacity of the government to curb it durably.