According to the analysis of Mediamonitor, Rai3 is the TV network that talked the most about French elections, while Enrico Letta is the Italian politician most cited by the national media in the context of the race for the Elysée.
The Italian media still completely focused on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine (84,924 citations), the French presidential elections (7,226) had a bit of space, but the victory at the Australian GP of Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc (4,069) had more visibility than the president Emmanuel Macron (3,909).
This data came from the monitoring carried out on over 1,500 media sources including print media (national, local and periodical newspapers), newspaper sites, major radios, TVs and blogs by Mediamonitor, a platform that uses technology and solutions developed by CEDAT85. Mediamonitor investigated who were the protagonists of the Elysée race most present in the Italian media from midnight on Sunday April 3rd (one week before the elections) to 3 pm on Wednesday April 13th.
Macron is tailed by his opponent in the April 24 ballot, Marine Le Pen, who obtained 3,593 mentions, while Jean Luc Mélenchon – considered the tip of the balance of these elections – who declared that “we must not give a single vote to Le Pen”, is on the lowest step of the podium (2,283). In fourth position the new face of French populism, Eric Zemmour (1,770), who beats both Le Pen (282) and Mélenchon (266) in terms of the number of citations only on radio and TV stations (331). Fifth place for the neo-Gaullist Valérie Pécresse (1,088), who rose to the limelight of the media mainly because she asked for the financial help of her supporters to meet the debts incurred for the electoral campaign. She didn’t reach the threshold of 5% necessary for the compensation of electoral expenses.
Among the Italian party leaders who commented on the French presidential elections, the most cited, perhaps precisely because of his strong link with France, since he has long directed the School of International Affairs of the Sciences Po University in Paris, is Enrico Letta (823), followed by Matteo Salvini (732), a great fan of Le Pen, and by Giorgia Meloni (434), who instead declared that she did not feel represented by any of the candidates in the ballot.
Analysing only the data relating to television broadcasters, Mediamonitor highlights that the French presidential elections were mainly followed by Rai (229 citations), which leaves behind Mediaset (131), SkyTG24 (98) and La7 (65). Among the news channels, RaiNews24 and SkyTG24 share the first place equally, with 98 citations, while among the general TV channels Rai3 (57), Rai1 (38) and Rai2 (26) and Rete4 (26) beat Canale 5 (23). Macron had visibility above all on TGCom24 (48) and SkyTG24 (47), Le Pen on RaiNews (34), and TGCom24 (33).