Expect the Unexpected. French Media Perceptions of the 2017 UK general election campaign
Résumé
“Will the British manage to surprise us again?”, quipped L’Express magazine a week before election day, once the campaign had turned out to be much more gripping than initially expected. Tracking French media coverage of the UK General Election campaign had been somewhat dispiriting at first due to the paucity and lack of substance of the coverage. Because of the Brexit negotiations, the stakes were high for France as well as the rest of the EU, and thus the French media were eager to frame the UK ballot as D-Day for Brexit. But as the topic of Brexit in fact ranked very low in the election campaign itself, this angle could not get much traction. As in the UK, the tipping point came with the publication of the YouGov/Times poll on 26 May which showed a significant narrowing of the gap between Labour and the Conservatives. Something unexpected was beginning to take place. The spectacular rise of Labour combined with the shock of the two terror attacks rekindled French media interest. Despite initial concerns that French media coverage consisted mainly of rehashed UK articles and news agencies’ dispatches, and that this failed to provide a specific French perspective, the analysis did eventually yield some interesting results.