If the vote was on Twitter...
How would the top 5 candidates do?

Receiving considerable international attention, the French Presidential Election 2017 is a key political event for 2017, and is the focus of this data story.

The French presidential election scenery is dominated by five leading candidates: Marine Le Pen, Emmanuel Macron, François Fillon, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Benoît Hamon. On April 23, these five will fight for the vote within the first round, followed by a second round between the two leading candidates on May 7.

​According to latest polls, Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron are estimated to be in the lead, François Fillon follows in third, while Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Benoît Hamon close the top 5 in the presidential race.

Our research adds another dimension to the French election polls by looking at the Twitter followers growth for each of the top 5 candidates over the last 30 days (Mar 19 - Apr 18) and on the interest based on the Google searches per city.
Join us on our data-driven journey in the intriguing world of the 2017 French Elections
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Source: Twitter
profiles of candidates studied on Mar 19 2017 and Apr 18 2017

New followers on Twitter

To analyze the effect of the presidential campaign for each of the top 4 candidates, we looked into their follower lists of Twitter in the course of the last month (between Mar 19 and Apr 18).

In this time frame, Emmanuel Macron managed to increase his followers by the greatest proportion among the five candidates – he counts on 13% more supporters on Twitter compared to 30 days ago.

However, considering growth in absolute numbers, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is profiting from the greatest rise in the number of followers – 92,655. However, due to his prominent starting base, this was only a 9% increase over the course of the month.

Marine Le Pen, who has the largest number of followers in total, has only grown her number of followers by 4%, which translates into 49,622 new followers.

Who provokes more interest?

Adding another layer of analysis to better understand the way that the campaign affects the top 5 candidates, we looked into the interest they provoke in France in general, and also in four major French cities (data source: Google Analytics).

Paris

In the capital city, François Fillon triggers the most interest, receiving 48.5% of all google searches in the city on the top 5 candidates.

He is followed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon with 22.2% of the interest, while Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, stay in 3rd and 4rd with 18.1% and 9.1% of the search respectively.

Toulouse & Lyon

Even though François Fillon is the most searched candidate across all France, he received extra amount of attention in Toulouse where his name triggers 54.6% of the search among the top 5 candidates.

In both Toulouse and Lyon, Mélenchon comes second while Macron is in third with no significant deviation from the national average interest in his name.

Marseille

In Marseille, Jean-Luc Mélenchon challenges the interest in François Fillon (39.5%, below national average) claiming 36.5% of the search there.

Marseille is also where Macron receives the lowest amount of interest among the top 4 French cities.
 
Wait! How come Le Pen is not interesting?
It is notable that Ms Le Pen who makes international headlines, comes only 4th when it comes to the interest in her name in France.

“This is due to Ms Le Pen being an established candidate who the French public already knew well ahead of the campaign. François Fillon, despite also being a career diplomat, has recently been affected by the corruption scandal which French media closely follows. Other candidates, who the French knew little of at the start of the campaign, also provoke greater attention than Ms Le Pen at this stage of the race, as their platforms and personalities unveil”, comments Pedro Pereira, who covers the French election for Kalinax.

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