> If voting differently doesn't make a difference, then why vote? Is it actually a democracy if elections don't have any impact?

It's not that elections don't have an impact, they do, but you shouldn't expect that impact to manifest itself as large swings in aggregate statistics, for two reasons:

1. Those statistics measure the aggregate behavior of many individuals, most of which are not elected officials but ordinary people. Unless the government adopts a command economy and micromanages everything, they have only limited influence on what ordinary people are doing.

2. The people voting in each election are mostly the same and they're not going to suddenly vote all that differently.

If you want to know what kind of impact an election outcome had, look at things the government influences directly, where there are widely divergent opinions on what to do, and where the election coincides with a change in which opinion has majority support.

This is actually the same in the US where you have a false choice between red/blue teams both always led by old white dudes lobbied into oblivion (legally) by capital.

Or in spain, where you have the red/blue dichotomy, and a -constitutional democracy-, and a king. All living under the umbrella of the mere appointment of the past dictator from 70y ago... and all doing the same pillaging and corruption no matter their -supposed- ideologies you're supposed to vote for.

I think we've been sold democracy as a one size fits all solution, and it might have worked for the greek polis (where btw, democracy co-lived with slavery too) but might be a flawed thing in the 21st century of globalisation and mass media and corps much bigger and powerful than nation states...

YMMV

Because it's a fallacy to think "change" is the purpose. If we cant fix the french mindset bar a terrible crisis, then the best to do is to soft manage the country like all presidents did since the americans showered us with money and made us believe we didnt have to work for it.

We could change, but how many decades of instability to move towards capitalism away from the nanny state ? Knowing us we d be communist before being individualist. I think Macron got it and is trying very slowly, that s good enough and I vote satisfied. Why always revolt and break everything ?