Netflix’s French political comedy series, Represent follows Stéphane Blé, a youth center leader from a Paris suburb as he becomes the unlikely contender in the presidential elections.
Plot summary
Stéphane Blé leads a youth center in a Paris suburb, taking care of the young guys who often find themselves in trouble, with family issues at home and difficulties in running a stable livelihood.
When the presidential hopeful Éric Andréï goes through the suburb with his media campaign, a miffed Blé engages in a verbal joust with the politician.
In front of dozens of people and live broadcasting cameras, Blé gives it straight and cold to Andréï, ripping on him for all the budget cuts he’s awarded the community associations.
His performance goes viral and he quickly gains a lot of support among the people, and Blé quickly finds himself in the limelight.
Soon, a campaign director called William Crozon introduces himself to Blé and tries to convince him to run for office. Blé is not convinced, and William’s broken Creole and efforts at connecting with him don’t exactly inspire much confidence.
However, when Lamine, one of the boys at the youth center who Blé cares deeply about gets detained, the leader goes to free him but the cops demand a family member to be present in order to bail him out.
A confrontation with the cop puts Blé into detainment as well but Crozon arrives again and promises to free him. He gathers up a crowd who chant and protest outside the police station, and in the evening, Blé and Lamine are released.
While Stéphane and his team get to work and start collecting signatures to seal his candidacy, Éric begins to foil his run, covertly meeting his cousin Désiré and making a deal with him wherein he makes Stéphane drop out of the race.
Stéphane doesn’t stop when Désiré talks him out of it but later on, his cousin set his henchmen off to commit arson at Blé’s office. Thanks to Maurice’s security cameras, Blé finds out who the arsonists were.
Later on, Blé continues his campaign, with William leading the front and forcing him to collect votes from the right-wing populace. The whole spiel costs Stéphane a lot when a right-wing nut shoots him in his testicles.
Meanwhile, it’s also revealed that William has been working for Etienne Durandeau all this time, and when he errs in hogging up the right-wing votes instead of siphoning the left-wing ones as planned, he switches to Éric’s side.
However, even the mayor ends up bailing on this campaign director with no spine. As Stéphane recovers at the hospital, his rating plummet and Éric finds a perfect opportunity to exploit and gas up his campaign, which does happen and he leads the popularity polls again.
Meanwhile, Yasmine catches on to William’s shady spiel and Lamine falls victim to Éric and Désiré’s plot to set him up and compromise Stéphane’s campaign.
The unprecedented occurs and Stéphane finds himself running alongside Corinne as one of the only two remaining presidential candidates. The live debate day arrives and Éric continues his attempts at sabotaging Stéphane’s campaign.
Lamine is on the run and Marion has to tag along and hide as well. Meanwhile, the election is closer than ever. All of this puts a great deal of stress on Stéphane’s marriage as his chances of winning remain hopelessly low, especially after the circus that his side created at the live debate.
The finality of Represent sees the chaos setting down with some somber conclusions and some miraculous turnarounds.
Represent ending explained in detail:
What happens to the other candidates?
Éric Andréï, Etienne Durandeau, and Fred Cognard are three of the five total presidential candidates in the run to become the president, along with Corinne Douanier and Stéphane Blé.
While Corinne, Stéphane, and Éric are from the left wing of the political spectrum, Etienne is the face of the right-wing while Fred, of the extreme right wing.
The race to the presidency is tough and virtually impossible for Stéphane, whose biggest role throughout Represent would be to detract the vote share from other candidates in the left wing.
That is why Éric sees him as such a big nuisance and wants him to drop out of the race at any cost. Meanwhile, Etienne, with the help of the spineless William Crozon, benefits from Stéphane’s siphoning of the leftist vote share.
However, the impossible seems to turn possible in the blink of an eye when three major candidates are forced to withdraw from the campaigns.
A major email leak, caused reportedly by Russian hackers, exposes some of the most damning stuff about Éric, Etienne, and Fred.
Éric’s embezzlement of millions, Etienne’s high treason, and Fred’s bestiality come out in the open and all three politicians are forced to drop out of their presidential campaigns.
Who exposed the candidates?
It’s at the last episode of Represent where it’s revealed that it was actually Yasmine who exposed Éric, Etienne, and Fred’s emails, not the Russian hackers.
She reveals it to Stéphane, who’s down with his feeble morale in the face of the impending defeat, that it was she and her collective who leaked all those incriminating emails of all those candidates.
She also reveals that she didn’t do it for Stéphane; it was something she and her collective had been working on for a year in order to bust up the elections.
Yasmine then shows Stéphane the truth about William, his campaign director who was actively working against him all this time. In Represent episode 6, Stéphane finally confronts William and shouts him away from his team.
What happens to Lamine?
Lamine is a victim of Désiré and Éric’s setup. Désiré sends his men to stage a drug deal with Lamine, who catches on to the suspicious plot and ends up pushing one of Désiré’s guys, who hits his head on a railing and falls into a coma.
While the police chase him, Lamine successfully escapes and later goes on a run. Stéphane plots to have Lamine and Marion both go hide in Normandy, with Marion having the excuse of resting after her IVF there.
However, thanks to Éric, the police eventually catch up to Lamine, who again escapes to safety. At the end of Represent, though, he’s finally decided to give himself into the police, surrendering so that Stéphane’s campaign can go forward.
Do Stéphane and Marion stay together?
Stéphane and Marion split up by the end of Represent. Marion tries to back Stéphane through all of his overtly optimistic shenanigans.
However, the infertility stuff and then the running from the police, as well as the arrest of Lamine are all too much for her.
Marion finally calls it quits and splits up with Stéphane. In the final episode of Represent, she’s shown to be joyously celebrating the miraculous victory of her estranged husband, but their relationship isn’t given any further development after that.
How does Stéphane win?
Represent ends with a sheet miracle, but then again, Stéphane’s presidential run is rife with miracle after miracle.
Although his poor (to put it extremely charitably) performance at the live debate plummets his ratings and the polls significantly favor Corinne afterward, Stéphane ends up winning the election and becomes the president.
After giving a gracious speech to his team before his presumably inevitable defeat, Stéphane is shocked to see the election results, as is everyone else.
He secures a fraction over 51 percent of the votes — a clear victory over the likely winner up until that time, Corinne Douanier.
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