In my post yesterday I wrote that I would probably be in a state of terror this evening, meditating on a possible calamitous outcome in tomorrow’s vote. Well, it is now the evening and while not serene, I am not fretting or wringing my hands. The calm before the hurricane? On the possible impact of Thursday night’s terrorist attack on the Champs-Elysées, an Odoxa poll partly taken Friday—when the attack was dominating the news—revealed a 1% increase in Marine Le Pen’s score and a 0.5% drop for the other top contenders, and with an uptick for Marine in Friday’s numbers compared to those collected by the institute on Thursday before the attack. The final BVA poll, partly taken on Friday, showed no change in MLP’s score, however. As the attack is not leading the news today and the official campaign ended at midnight last night—so no possibility for MLP to demagogue and whip up fear the day before voters go to the polls—one may wager that it will have no appreciable effect on the result.
Another cause for relative calm is the stability in the polls: of the fifteen taken over the past week, thirteen have had Emmanuel Macron in the lead, one with him and MLP tied, and one with MLP leading by half a point. The stability has caused Nate Silver and Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight—who think this not normal—to wonder about possible “herding” by the polling institutes, though The Economist magazine deems it unlikely that French pollsters would be cooking their numbers. If they are, I’d be surprised; of the nine institutes doing horse race polls, six have been around for a while, i.e. decades, and have track records. And the political pollsters of two of the top institutes, Brice Teinturier (IPSOS) and Jérôme Fourquet (IFOP), are regulars on TV and radio, where they are periodically asked to explain their methodologies. If the polling numbers are all in the same range, maybe it’s because that’s where they really are. And the track record of French pollsters has indeed been fairly good over time, though, in a multi-candidate race, there will inevitably be at least one surprise: e.g. in 2012, it was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who underperformed his final poll numbers; in 2007, it was Nicolas Sarkozy (over) and Jean-Marie Le Pen (under). In tomorrow’s vote, there will no doubt be at least one surprise and possibly by up to three points.
There are six configurations, all of which are possible. I will rank order them, from what I consider to be the most likely to the least:
1. Macron-Fillon. This will be the surprise, with François Fillon finishing second, ahead of Marine Le Pen. In this scenario, there are is a “shy” Fillon vote out there, of older voters—who privilege his experience and nerves of steel—and others on the right, who have been disgusted with Fillon and his affaires but finally feel they have no other choice. And that Fillon electorate is there. On this, see the essay by Hugo Drochon, who teaches politics at the University of Cambridge, in Project Syndicate, posted two days before Le Canard Enchaîné broke the first affaire. If this scenario comes to pass, Macron will win in a walk.
2. Macron-Le Pen. If polls are predictions—which they’re not—this will be it. In the 2nd round, EM destroys MLP.
3. Le Pen-Fillon. Macron majorly underperforms and Fillon the opposite, with disaster the consequence, as the French electorate will be presented with a choice between two deeply unpopular personalities, indeed the most unpopular in the French political class. And for the left it will be a catastrophe, of the reactionary right vs. the extreme right. The perversity of the French two-round system will be laid bare. Hypothetical 2nd round match-ups have had Fillon defeating Le Pen handily but I’m not so sure. I will personally hold my nose and vote Fillon but many voters on the left will not do this. They will vote blanc/nul or abstain. Harvard University government lecturer Yascha Mounk, in his “A primer on the French election: Four candidates, three nightmare scenarios” in Slate, summed up the matter
The prospect that Fillon might face Le Pen in the second round is terrifying for two reasons: First, there is every reason to think that he might lose. And second, even if he did win, he would make a terrible president—close to the Kremlin, regressive on social issues, pursuing an unimaginative course of cuts without investment in the economy, and entering office under the stinking cloud of an ongoing investigation for corruption.
Further down, Mounk asserts
The election of Fillon would strengthen Putin’s hand, give French voters even better reason to conclude that their country’s political class is controlled by the corrupt and the self-serving, and deepen popular disenchantment with democracy.
The election of Fillon, who is damaged goods if there ever were any—and for whom many will cast their votes solely to block the even worse Marine Le Pen—would be so very bad for France. Yesterday I ran into a recent former student of mine, who is a salaried legislative assistant of the LR party. He told me that he is so revolted by Fillon and his affaires that he would not be able to vote for him in the 1st round. And he wasn’t alone, so he said. If he, as an LR activist, feels this way, one can imagine the attitude of those outside the base of that party. I rest my case.
4. Macron-Mélenchon. If nothing else, this would make for an epic 2nd round debate. My choice is obvious but quite a few people I know on the left would vote JLM. EM would win easily, though. I wouldn’t mind this scenario at all.
5. Le Pen-Mélenchon. Everyone’s nightmare scenario. The specter of this is so terrifying that I can’t even contemplate what would happen the next day—financial markets, general hysteria in France and Europe—not to mention over the subsequent two weeks. As I’ve already written, I will vote Mélenchon: anyone and anything to block Marine LP, but also with the utter certainty that he would not obtain a majority in the June legislative elections, and thus not be able to implement any of his hare-brained schemes. As for who would win the 2nd round: six months ago I would have said MLP but today, no doubt JLM.
6. Fillon-Mélenchon. The least likely scenario but no less nightmarish to contemplate. If this comes to pass, I will nullify my ballot, i.e. rip it in two (there will be two ballots, actually—one for each candidate—so two to rip). I may loathe JLM but will not vote for the unspeakable Fillon to stop him. And there is no way I will vote JLM to block a corrupt right-wing candidate but who will not pull France out of the European Union. If any lefties out there need arguments against JLM at this point, see the commentaries by Nathalie Nougayrède, Elie Cohen, Guillaume Duval, Jean-Pierre Filiu, Henri Weber, and Marcel Sel that I’ve posted on social media over the past few days. Who would win this one? I have no idea. It could go either way.
My crap shoot prediction:
Macron: 23
Fillon: 22
Le Pen: 21
Mélenchon: 17
Hamon: 9
Dupont-Aignan: 3.5
Poutou: 1.5
Lassalle: 1
Arthaud: <1
Asselineau: <1
Cheminade: <1
Participation rate: 77%
À demain.
Arun with a View 
Arun,
I really don’t know what to say beyond thanks for the excellent summary and I share your unease. I don’t see this ending well for France or anyone else, for that matter. But two thoughts are beginning to gel in my mind.
I would like to make a pitch for Harmon. If I were French, I would definitely vote for him in the first round. Everyone seems to prefer him and his center-left ideas but doesn’t want to “waste” their vote. I don’t see it that way since I think the favorite (Macron) is overrated and outclassed. I say a vote for Macron in the first round is this riskiest possible thing and immeasurably increases the risk of a MLP victory. If all the people who think Harmon is the best candidate with the best manifesto voted for him, he would make it to the second round—and I believe that he would defeat MLP but Macron would lose to her because he is a weak, untested candidate who cannot put together a republican front.
I must disagree with your assessment that Macron will destroy Le Pen. I think it far more like that she will destroy him. Being all things to all people seems to have served Macron well for a short while, but I think that persona has been bumping up against some reals limits as people started demanding specificity and authenticity. When you finally strip away the last strategically placed fan in Macron’s “ni-ni” fan dance, it turns out he’s basically running for an even more centrist version of Hollande’s second term. Outside of the militants of the center (who are a tiny minority), there is very little appetite for more of the same and once MLP starts working him over on this point, Macron’s campaign, which I think has stalled for precisely this reason, will quickly begin swirling around the toilet bowl.
Smarmy Macron is untested. He’s sinking in the polls. He is already alienated from the base of the PS and despised by the left generally. If Macron follows what appear to be his natural instincts and runs sharply to the right in the second round, the fear of MLP probably won’t be enough to rally the PS to his side. My prediction is that by the end of his victory speech, Macron will have irreversibly alienated what remains of the PS who may end up staying home because they hate him more than they fear Le Pen.
And in what looks to be another antiestablishment election, MLP will savage him as a cipher, a chancer and as the totally rotten champion of the totally rotten establishment. I think the conventional wisdom is simply wrong. I hope to be proven wrong but I say that Macron is not the safe choice in the first round. I believe MLP will make mincemeat out of the smarmy bastard.
Mitch: I entirely disagree with what you say about Macron vs. Le Pen. My assertion that the former will destroy the latter in the 2nd round is based not on wishful thinking or idle speculation but on polling and other data. Every last hypothetical Marcon-Le Pen match-up has had him winning in a landslide. The narrowest margin I’ve seen has him beating her by 18 points (59-41), and most simulations have the margin over 20. Sure, some Mélenchon voters will abstain – one poll in March had it at a third – but the majority will vote for Macron to block Marine. And in the event of significant abstention on the left, it is still most unlikely that the overall participation rate will descend under 70%, which would be unprecedented. But even if a third of the electorate sits out the 2nd round, Marine Le Pen would need some 16 million votes to win, and there are not 16 million Frenchmen or women who will vote for her — and certainly not against a centrist.
Also, Marine LP is the one of the most unpopular political personalities in France and has been since she took over the FN from her father. Her favorable/unfavorable rating has always been deeply underwater: +27/-67 in the latest IPSOS ranking, +32/-68 at IFOP. Macron, by contrast, is the nº3 ranked politician in the country: +48/-43 at IPSOS, +55/-40 at IFOP. Based on these numbers alone, it makes no sense to think that she could beat him in a 2nd round face off, let alone make mincemeat of. Allez.
BTW, I will be voting for Hamon myself today.
Arun: I’m glad to hear that you will be voting for Hamon. I think his program is the only one that will save the social welfare state and avoid the privatizations that seems necessary to centrists (and which, coincidentally, happen to massive enrich themselves and their friends).
I continue to disagree with you about Le Pen’s chances because I think your focus on her as an individual is misplaced. I think she’s basically going to be presenting herself as the curative to the ills of “Europe” and will be making it a contest between herself (as the placeholder for the unhappiness of La France profonde) on the one hand. And the representative of the Eurocrats and the establishment on the other—who is running for the second term of the deeply unpopular Hollande. Combine that with the ease with which Macron can (rightly, I believe) be branded as smarmy and a chancer with no programs, no beliefs and no core values and I think you have a second round that potentially focuses not on MLP’s negative but rather on the negatives of Macron as both an individual and as a placeholder for the downside of “Europe” and, especially, of austerity.
I continue to believe the MLP can win. And I think that Macron would be the weakest of the candidates against her in the second round.
People were worried that she’d make mincemeat of him in the first round debates; instead he outperformed her. His numbers have risen and fallen but in comparison to a month ago he’s fairly stable, having then been between 23 and 25.5%. She, on the other hand, was between 24.5 and 27, so she’s faded slightly.
Faded in the polls, that is. In reality… we’ll see. If I were French I’d be voting for Macron if only out of fear that the polls were wrong.
Fillon is the climb back that never happened. Check the graph between first and second round estimates on the wiki page. I would put Macron 2 points higher than you did and still expect Macron MLP to be the more probable configuration. Otherwise, your opening odoxa words are independently confirmed even later (TdG).
Micro-evidence: even in the profoundly rightist and not so clean town (Aix) where I am staying now, I observed that Fillon supporters were very lackluster and that most people would not take their litterature.We’ll see.
thanks for your lively and interesting analyses.
Bernard: We’ll see tonight about Fillon (and all the others). There is indeed a lot of hostility toward Fillon but there are still people who have a positive opinion of him: 24% in the IPSOS ranking and 27% at IFOP, so all of these are potential votes in his column.
I hope you’re right about Macron.
Not going to happen if you waste your vote on hamon!
I don’t consider a Hamon vote wasted. I don’t want him to be humiliated. And not that I care a whit about the PS but if Hamon falls under 5%, the party is dead as a doornail. That wouldn’t be good for the left, as the void left by the PS would be partially filled by La France Insoumise. The left doesn’t need that.
I am also sufficiently confident for Macron’s chances (#FamousLastWords), so thus felt that he could do without my vote today.
So one more time, I did my duty and saved France from the abyss.
Without any hesitation, I calmly but firmly said “No !” to the stinking, corrupt right wing churchy candidate and the noisy nationalist, xenophobic, marinade of crypto-fascists. I unshakeably refused to support the loudmouthed socialo-communiste provocateur and his dreaming bigots clique, nor the official solitary official dissident social-democrat, neither the couple of pitiful archeo-trostskistes. I ignored the nano candidates and standing upright, smiling in a state of luminous mindfulness, I voted for our future President, Matthieu Pigasse.
😉
you were ready to join my soon-to-be comite des intellectuels anti-fascistes except for those last two words. I will instead direct you to l’internationale situationniste.
I am feeling very lucky today, having put macron in front of le pen. Or, maybeit’s not just luck.
it now looks like participation will be higher than in 2012. I am feeling extra lucky.
I was hoping Fillon would weasel his way into the 2nd just to put Le Pen in 3rd. That would have been unexpected and humiliating for her. It would have been sweeter to have her behind the odious Melenchon. In any case I’m pulling for Macron warts and all.
congratulations to Benoit Hamon. Having trashed the government of the left for five years, he has now destroyed the socialist party although he narrowly failed to bankrupt it. He will surely remain in history books as a great socialist alongside Lionel Jospin.
So I lost my bet that the evil lady would not make it to the second round (This is going to cost me an orbital flight with Space X for my wife…). But the good news is that the dark witch is getting worse every day. She looses her fluency. Her insanities do not spout as fresh and powerful as before. She reminds me of the old Duracell batteries commercials, her rabbit is running low on juice while the happy Macron Rabbit keeps drumming at a steady pace. She will have a very hard time rounding up more fools with her grinning smile. And god bless the photographer who shot all these scary movie type and sick pictures of her (Fillon also looked dead and already embalmed) that we see everyday in the media. No hope, no light, no future there. Two more weeks and she will leave the front page of the news. Game over. I’m not too worried about the F.N. in the législatives (should I ?), sure they’ll grab a few seats, but that will not be a landslide. After the législatives, the F.N. will more or less return to sleep as usual. The evil lady will decline, sit on the porch with her dad and disappear from the media as the new young blond witch Marion with the shiny teeth will rise.
Well done, you only forgot to script the scene where the niece directs the remake of the night of the long knives (2018), coming to a theater near you.
I disagree with Bernard on Hamon. *He* didn’t trash the PS. His campaign certainly had problems, but both campaigns I’ve seen so far in France (Royal and Hollande) weren’t all that professional compared to the US.
Listen to voters from traditional PS strongholds: The PS did itself in (fairly or unfairly, Hollande is blamed as is his government, and failing to hear that also lead to the paltry results)
I’m not as pessimistic as some commenters: I believe Hamon’s results are a chance and that the PS will now be born again. I heard “Mitterrand’s PS is dead”, which I hope is true. This party needs to change. Something designed 40 years ago can’t work in the 21st century.
Hamon’s platform wasn’t extreme, it was forward thinking, but he didn’t explain it well until late – of course, if the PS had been explaining it for a while with Primaries in the Fall (January primaries were frankly stupid, who thought of that date???!!) it’d have been easier than to have only 2 months.
The idea of “basic universal income” has a lot of promise and I very much hope it won’t be dropped. It was NOT meant for people who don’t work, contrary to what was originally asserted. Wel, it was, but RSA would go from 574 to 600, so no biggie. However it was meant at two specific groups in particular:
– Young people:
middle class families are okay but when their kids go to university it really stretches their budget, so it was time-limited financial aid to help middle class families from smaller towns handle room and board in university towns (it covers rent and food in most university towns).
It’s also a way to insert money into the market through increased consumption, since young people rarely save but rather spend (in part because they need to buy furniture for their apartment, etc).
Another way that was strongly pushed at the meeting I was at was to encourage students to save part of that money in order to “invest in themselves” rather than wait around for a paid job out of an internship – that is, pool their saved money for a start up or a small business (the young people were enthusiastic about trying to create a flower and landscaping business, for which they’d been trained at the lycee agricole but had not outcome in sight beside part-time “vendeur à jardiland” which they didn’t excite them as much as creating their own business.)
Another point made was that all the unskilled “petits boulots” currently occupied by students would then be available for unskilled unemployed adults, creating a virtuous circle – and because the basic income would be added automatically it’d create a powerful incentive to accept the “petit boulot” and thus leave the “vicious circle” of poverty.
It also means jobs under the guise of “internships”, which as seen countless companies use so that they could pay young people €564 a month instead of a living wage, will have to return to jobs, because between a fake internship and an small income, it’s easy for students to pick the real internship or nothing. Which in turn will free up more jobs.
– another target: low-skilled women who work part-time: most earn half to 2/3 of a SMIC, or around 600-800 euros. Not much more than RSA, feeding rancor and bitterness. With the basic income added, work becomes “worth it again”, by providing a guaranteed source of income that allows families to live in dignity.
Where I live, people who used to vote for the PS didn’t because 1° “the old guys in the party won’t let him complete his program” or 2° “he’s got fewer chances than Mélenchon so even though I like him better I’ll vote for Mélenchon so the left is in the second round”. There is INTENSE dislike and spite for the traditional PS, Hollande, etc, and if the PS scored low it’s not because Hamon was a frondeur (people who care a whit about it tended to agree with him and thus are severe against the PS leaders who didn’t honor their promise made in the primaries.)
In fact, at a factory which had kept the area in jobs for 100 years and closed *whereas it made money and was considered quite profitable*, anger had originally bubbled into an avowed Le Pen vote, but once Mélenchon got onto their radar, the workers, who still meet at the factory where they ought to show up till a specific date, even if there’s no work, in order to complete the terms for their severance package, channeled their revolt at what was done into a Mélenchon vote.
Perhaps my area (where there are lots of red dots everywhere on the maps and an entire red département nearby) is not typical, but what was rejected in the several towns where I have friends, is not Hamon so much as the “old PS” and Macron/Mélenchon votes were tactical rather than supportive.
My guess is that in the ten days that come, Emmanuel Macron will make a few overtures toward disgruntled or worried workers, will include a lot more “écologie”, perhaps using important code words for each category.
Today’s Amiens visit is going to be super tricky: Apparently he’s decided to visit the Chamber of commerce, whereas MLP has gone to visit the Whirlpool factory workers. If he doesn’t pull something out of his hat (like an actual solution, not a vague promise), the symbol will hurt him a lot. Already F2 is trying to present a balanced view and so we have “she’s against brutal globalization, he’s in favor of opening borders and facilitating globalized exchanges”, which people currently bearing the brunt of unregulated (“brutal”) globalization hear all too well. Think that Whirlpool was used as an example of “reasonable” workers, who accepted pay cuts and longer hours but kept their factory open. They accepted this and now their profitable factory’s being shipped to Poland… how can they not be against the EU and globalization? This is what you could hear in the nes today. They’re very reluctant about MLP and the FN but they’re also betrayed and angry, so they’re on the verge of “why not?”. The fact EM is from Amiens and hasn’t visited them once also rankles and hurts. So this day shapes up to be key. We’ll see how smart EM is wrt this issue.