Reconfiguration of political communities at the time of the primaries held by the right-wing party.

These primaries were marked by three debates and two votes. One can observe the progressive and regular reinforcement of the Fillon community, week after week, although no-one was predicting his victory in the second round, since Juppé was tipped by the polls to win. As a result of the first round, following the surprise victory of Fillon and the equally surprising elimination of Sarkozy (president of the Les Républicains party and ex-President of France), only a minute portion of the Sarkozy community moved to that of Fillon. The Sarkozy community was reluctant to join the Fillon community, and Sarkozy spent several days negotiating positions for his members within the Fillon structure. The Juppé community, however, immediately distanced itself from the new political orientations adopted by the party. This right-wing split was apparent in the pre-electoral environment (see Fig 1). Following the failed return of Juppé in March 2017 (see Fig 11), part of his community moved to join Macron. The bifurcations observed here are clearly summarized by an article published by BFMTV on 12 December 2016: “Life after the primary: Sarkozy relocates his close allies, Juppé is ‘down’”. Each vertical bar corresponds to a political community on Twitter, labelled with the accounts of candidates who were active in the community. The height of the bar is proportional to the number of Twitter accounts belonging to this community. These are computed every Monday.