Ni gauche ni droite? Positioning the candidates in the 2017 French presidential election

The 2017 French presidential election is regarded as a watershed in French politics, with Emmanuel Macron winning the election as the leader of a newly founded political movement. This paper probes the idea that the French political ideological space has lost its bipolar structure and that the election forms a continuation of a decreasing political polarization blurring the left–right divide, a trend posited to have occurred since the 2000s. It uses an inductive scaling approach drawing on information about candidate policy stances from the Voting Advice Application Boussole Présidentielle to extract candidates’ positions and to explore which issue domains structure their inter-relations. The resulting candidate policy space does not suggest a dissolution of ideological differences between left and right. Yet, while Macron and Le Pen do not transcend a polarized left–right divide, they do mark deviations from a clear-cut bipolar left–right block structure and increase political complexity