One of the main topics this week is the presidential election in France. This Sunday, April 24, there will be a second round of voting. As in 2017, Emmanuel Macron, the current head of the republic, and Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally party, will run for the office of president.
There are heated debates on the Internet about the future of France, even on such a platform as Twitch, which seems to be apolitical. Streams Charts analyzed activity on the most popular French Twitch channels and found out how often the platform's users mention the presidential candidates and which urgent problems of the country are most actively discussed.
There were 12 candidates in the first round of the presidential election, and the main contest was expectedly between Macron and Le Pen. Moreover, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the France Unbowed party received more than 21.9% of the votes. Éric Zemmour of the Reconquest party was in fourth place with 7% of the votes. We analyzed how often viewers of French-speaking Twitch channels mentioned them in their messages.
Disclaimer: the statistics include data from the most popular French-speaking Twitch channels that are in the Top 1000 of the platform.
Emmanuel Macron became the most widely discussed candidate for president, as expected. The current head of the republic is actively involved in the settlement of the Russian-Ukrainian crisis and is very popular with Internet users: just recall memes about his phone calls, which became popular far beyond France. Between March 1 and April 21, he was mentioned in a total of 128.9K messages.
Marine Le Pen has long been considered Macron's main opponent, and she expectedly ranked second by Twitch chat mentions. However, the number of messages mentioning her was still as much as 45% lower than the number mentioning Macron. The gap was much more significant than in the first round of the election, bге Le Pen got only 4.6% less votes.
The situation with the most popular candidates who did not make it to the second round is much more interesting. Mélenchon was far ahead of Zemmour in the first round by the votes cast, but the far-right journalist and politician was mentioned slightly more times in the chats of French channels — 48,065 vs. 48,015 mentions.
On the chart of presidential candidates' name mentions, we can see two sharp surges. The first one was on April 10, the first day of the presidential election: according to the number of messages, the candidates ranged in the same order as they did according to the results of the voting. Macron outpaced his rivals far more by mentions than by votes.
We can see that after the first round, when all the candidates except Macron and Le Pen were eliminated, the mentions of Mélenchon and Zemmour practically disappeared. The second sharp peak was on April 20, when the TV debate between Macron and Le Pen took place. And this time, the incumbent French president was also far ahead of his opponent by mentions in chats.
The French political agenda is full of topics on which the candidates have different positions. We examined which of them were the most relevant for French-speaking Twitch users.
In early March, the viewers of the top French channels discussed the war between Ukraine and Russia the most. By mid-April the references to these countries became less frequent, but still remained on the agenda.
Related: How has Ukrainian and Russian streaming changed during the war?
The most acute debate between the candidates, such as pension reform, national security, and education, were rarely discussed in the chats. Interestingly, Twitch viewers talked about ecology much more often: for example, during the first round of voting, this topic appeared in the messages most frequently. And the most revealing statistic was on April 20, when the debate between Macron and Le Pen was held: ecology prevailed by a huge margin over all other major topics.
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