This content was published on 05 April 2022 – 15:48
Paris, Apr 5 (EFE).- The fight for the French Presidency in the April elections expands its range of resources and, beyond the traditional face-to-face rallies, resorts to holograms and video games in an attempt to differentiate itself.
The far-leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La Francia Insumisa, was already known for multiplying his presence through virtual replicas and this Tuesday he is redoubling his efforts with twelve simultaneous rallies, eleven of them thanks to new technologies.
The candidate, third in voting intentions in the first round of April 10 (15.5%), behind the president, Emmanuel Macron (27%) and the far-right Marine Le Pen (23%), according to a poll Ifop, will speak from the Grand Palais de Lille, in the north of the country.
At the same time, his hologram will appear live in Albertville, Besançon, Le Havre, Metz, Montluçon, Narbonne, Nice, Pau, Poitiers, Trappes and Vannes.
Its head of campaign events, Bastien Lachaud, explained to the press that the objective is to cover the entire national territory as much as possible, and that is why the cities have not been chosen at random: each Frenchman must be less than 250 kilometers from one of those meetings.
Mélenchon had already used holograms in his 2017 campaign, in which he was victorious against the liberal Macron, and his team claims to have improved the device so that the result is “even more impressive.”
In this campaign, they had already used projections on walls and even the dissemination of aromas.
To encourage the undecided, La Francia Insumisa has also created a “pocket” hologram for social networks like Snapchat and Instagram.
The candidate appears on the mobile screen, with the chosen background, and urges people to vote: “If you don’t vote, others will decide for you on issues that concern you. Vote, vote, vote,” he insists.
In a campaign virtually unnoticed by the pandemic first and the outbreak of the war in Ukraine later, the Elysée hopefuls have also turned to video games to reach younger voters.
Among them, the current tenant of the French Presidency, who has joined forces with Minecraft. This virtual space shows his headquarters or a meeting room, with his electoral posters and other places, such as a hospital or a school, that provide information on the balance of his five-year term.
The candidates are not always the ones behind the use of new technologies. A follower of far-rightist Éric Zemmour launched “Le Z” in March, a video game that invited Internet users to destroy ideas that did not seem patriotic to them.
To speak to those under 35, there are applicants who have also relied on the live broadcast platform Twitch.
Mélenchon is once again an outstanding student with his broadcast “Allo Mélenchon”, in which he talks to other “streamers”, while the team led by ecologist Yannick Jadot, with barely 4.5% of voting intentions according to this Ifop poll Monday, offers a series of programs, as if it were a television network.
“The elections are largely played on the networks and there are not only young people on the networks. These innovations allow us to reach a wide audience, although the youngest are the most sensitive to them,” Maëva Ortega, head of marketing, explains to Efe. of the FlipNpik application, which promotes local commerce.
New technologies, in his opinion, are an image coup with which to reach communities outside the radar of traditional media, but they have come to stay in political language: “Their use will evolve at the same time as social networks”, the expert concludes. EFE
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