Eurotunnel’s numbers slide is blamed on French voters

Eurotunnel today blamed a drop in shuttle traffic on holidaymakers and businesses choosing to stay at home around the time of the French election.

The Channel Tunnel operator witnessed a decrease in passenger traffic last month to 212,930 vehicles, compared with 221,618 in May 2016.

It said the fall came after being “penalised by an unfavourable electoral calendar in France” after Emmanuel Macron won the battle for the presidency with Marine Le Pen.

A Eurotunnel spokesman said: “This has been a very complicated year in politics on both sides of the Channel.

“That has had some influence on people’s travel decisions, and a number of people decided to stay at home and vote.”

But the firm had better news from its freight division, which saw truck traffic rise to 141,646 vehicles in May, up 3% on a year ago and a record for the month.

It added that Le Shuttle Freight established a daily record on June 8 with 3822 trucks transported in 24 hours in the Calais-Folkestone direction.

This beat the previous record of 3633 trucks, which was set in December 2015.

Eurotunnel said since the start of the year, truck traffic had fallen slightly by 1%. This was due to extreme weather conditions, including snow, in Spain at the beginning of the year.