Presidential-France: Queues in front of the polling stations, 65% participation at 5 p.m.

It’s D-Day for the candidates campaigning for the French presidential election. The polling stations are experiencing a significant crowd on this Sunday of the first round of voting. The results of the French in Los Angeles shocked but motivated other voters to speak out.

The French will have until 7 p.m. tonight, and even 8 p.m. in the big cities to choose the candidate who most resembles their ideal life in France. At 5 p.m., the participation rate was 65%.

Of the 12 candidates, only 6 stand out and only 3 have the possibility of running for the presidency of the State. But surprise scenarios cannot be ruled out.

Nearly 49 million voters are called to the polls and queues are counted all over the country. But according to observers, participation does not seem to be there.

This will also be the great unknown of this election, it will reveal the abstention rate of the French, and will have an impact on the result, favoring the candidates with the most committed electoral base. And this year, it would seem that it is the right and the far right that bring together the electoral base most motivated to push France to the other side.

If several observers had judged that the participation would be lower, but at noon, it seemed to be stable with rates similar to that of the 2017 presidential election.

At midday, all the candidates had voted, Anne Hidalgo (PS), the first, in Paris, Emmanuel Macron (LREM), the last, in Le Touquet.

And while the results of French voters living in Las Vegas who voted on Saturday were released on Sunday, French people in France and elsewhere in the world gathered to express their voices.

The results of the French in Las Vegas are astonishing, they put Emmanuel Macron alongside the far-right polemicist Éric Zemmour and won 32.04% of the vote, and it was Marine Le Pen, another far-right figure who came in 3rd place and recorded 15.47% of the votes.

Queues everywhere in all the polling stations are registered, the French seem determined to vote. And it was also seen in the number of online requests to verify his polling station.

The dedicated site of the Ministry of the Interior to verify its polling station was stormed by voters. Since mid-morning, the site has been overstretched, and up to 2 p.m., 525,000 requests had been satisfied, including 65,000 between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m.

Parisian voters are the least committed to voting, compared to voters in Lyon and the Rhône department. At noon, the participation in the Rhône was 28.26%, according to the Ministry of the Interior. Participation is stable compared to five years ago, showing exactly the same rate.

In other parts of the country, some voters opted to vote via machines instead of paper ballots. This is the case of Le Havre, in Seine-Maritime, and several municipalities in Hauts-de-Seine. But this principle is not generalized to all of France.