For the first time, a poll shows that half of the French disapprove of the presence of French soldiers in the Sahel. This exclusive Ifop * survey for Point, that we publish eight years to the day after the launch of Operation Serval on January 11, 2013, shows that 51% (so half, with the margins of error) of those polled are “not in favor” of the French military intervention in Mali, including 19% who are “not at all in favor”.
The question asked only concerns Mali, one of the five Sahel countries covered by Operation Barkhane, which succeeded Serval in 2014, and also extends to Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mauritania. But “we can extrapolate this result to all of Barkhane”, according to Jérôme Fourquet, director of the opinions department at Ifop, because “the French do not really make the distinction and most of the fighting and losses take place in Mali ”.
Barkhane will be “more and more difficult to justify”
The poll was carried out in early January, just after two deadly attacks that resulted in the deaths of five French soldiers in a few days. The so-called Bounti airstrike, which gave rise to a lively controversy (the French armies are accused of blunder, which they firmly deny), was known to the general public “for the most part after the investigation”, according to Jérôme Fourquet.
For the Elysee and the French armies, which already mentioned in 2020 a reduction in the workforce of Operation Barkhane in 2021, this survey shows a clear deterioration in membership of this external operation. Favorable opinions had reached 73% in 2013, the day after the liberation of Timbuktu, and remained at 59% in 2019, in a poll carried out just after the death of 13 French soldiers in the crash of two helicopters.
France will remain “as long as necessary”
“If we continue in this dynamic, the operation will be more and more difficult to justify for the executive in the months to come”, warns Jérôme Fourquet. By way of comparison, the intervention in Afghanistan began the day after September 11, 2001 with 55% of favorable opinions, to fall to 24% in 2011, just before the withdrawal of French troops.
“We do not have a vocation to be eternal in Mali and we know that it is a demanding, difficult presence”, explained the Minister of the Armed Forces Florence Parly, interviewed on France Inter on January 10. “We have achieved results in this fight against armed terrorist groups”, she repeated, assuring that France will remain “as long as it is necessary to allow the local armies to ensure security”.
Environmentalists more favorable to this war than the right
The details of the responses to our survey also provide a lot of lessons. If the opinions are appreciably similar between the different age groups, it is not the same according to the political opinions. Thus, those close to La République en Marche overwhelmingly support the operation (66%), while Republican sympathizers adhere to only 48% (this is even less for those who voted François Fillon in 2017, who only 41% agree). On the National Gathering side, they only adhere to 38%.
The military operation is more widely supported on the left, with an approval rate of 61% for PS sympathizers, 43% for La France insoumise and … 51% for environmentalists, ie 13 points more than the RN and 10 points more than among the voters of François Fillon.
Women more suspicious than men
“The voters of the party in power support the intervention more mechanically than the others”, decrypts Jérôme Fourquet, for whom “the low score on the far right is explained by an ideology that is not pacifist or antimilitarist, but isolationist and anti-racist, two points on which the electorate of François Fillon is fairly aligned ”. “A good part of these voters consider that the State should concentrate its efforts to dismantle Islamism in France, fight against delinquency and drug trafficking in territories considered lost by the Republic”, he adds.
Responses also vary a lot depending on the activity: executives approve (57%) while retirees are the most bored (44%). Finally, women are more suspicious (46%) than men (53%) of the operation. “You can also see the glass half full,” says Jérôme Fourquet. “That there is, eight years later and with 50 dead on the clock, still 49% of French people who support the operation, it’s not that bad,” he concludes. A reflection that echoes the good figures of the confidence of the French in the military institution: 74% according to a 2019 OpinionWay survey for Cevipof.
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