Polling dates confirmed for France’s hotly-contested 2022 presidential election

The dates that voters in France head to the polls to pick their new president have been officially confirmed by the French government.

Published: 22 June 2021 17:31 CEST
Updated: 13 July 2021 15:38 CEST

French President Emmanuel Macron and his main rival, Marine Le Pen, both gave TV interviews on Sunday. Here's what you need to know. (Photo by LUDOVIC MARIN / AFP)

Government spokesman Gabriel Attal on Tuesday confirmed that polling days will be April 10th, 2022, for the first round and April 24th for the second round. As is usual in French elections, both days are Sundays.

The dates had been announced earlier by French TV, but have now been formally confirmed.

French presidents hold a five-year mandate and elections are on fixed dates – as in the USA – rather than called by the Prime Minister as is the case in the UK.

French voters head to the polls in the first round to vote for any of the officially declared candidates, and then vote again two weeks later for one of the two highest-scoring candidates from the first round.

Current polling suggests that incumbent president Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen will be the two second round candidates, in a re-run of the 2017 election.

However French elections are predictably only in their unpredictability and many of the largest parties have not yet decided on a candidate, while Macron himself is yet to confirm that he will run.

The regional elections held in June – the las time the French go to the polls before the presidential vote – were remarkable for record voter abstention, while Le Pen’s party did significantly worse than predicted and Macron’s failed to progress to the second round in several areas.

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France has in recent weeks been shaken by a series of attacks on schoolchildren by their peers, in particularly the fatal beating earlier this month of Shemseddine, 15, outside Paris.

The far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party has accused Attal of not doing enough on security as the anti-immigration party soars ahead of the government coalition in polls for the June 9th election.

Speaking in Viry-Chatillon, the town where Shemseddine was killed, Attal condemned the “addiction of some of our adolescents to violence”, calling for “a real surge of authority… to curb violence”.

“There are twice as many adolescents involved in assault cases, four times more in drug trafficking, and seven times more in armed robberies than in the general population,” he said.

Measures will include expanding compulsory school attendance to all the days of the week from 8am to 6pm for children of collège age (11 to 15).

“In the day the place to be is at school, to work and to learn,” said Attal, who was also marking 100 days in office since being appointed in January by President Emmanuel Macron to turn round the government’s fortunes.

Parents needed to take more responsibility, said Attal, warning that particularly disruptive children would have sanctions marked on their final grades.

OPINION: No, France is not suffering an unprecedented wave of violence

Promoting an old-fashioned back-to-basics approach to school authority, he said “You break something – you repair it. You make a mess – you clear it up. And if you disobey – we teach you respect.”

Attal also floated the possibility of children in exceptional cases being denied the right to special treatment on account of their minority in legal cases.

Thus 16-year-olds could be forced to immediately appear in court after violations “like adults”, he said. In France, the age of majority is 18, in accordance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Macron and Attal face an uphill struggle to reverse the tide ahead of the European elections. Current polls point to the risk of a major debacle that would overshadow the rest of the president’s second mandate up to 2027.

A poll this week by Ifop-Fiducial showed the RN on 32.5 percent with the government coalition way behind on 18 percent.