Nerves fray as France goes to the polls
NERVES WILL jangle this weekend, and not just in France, but polls suggest that there is scant chance of Marine Le Pen becoming the first far-right leader of a major industrial nation since 1945.
The Front National leader has fought the more energetic and eyecatching campaign in the second round of the French elections. She also made a couple of stupid mistakes which exposed the hollowness of her claims to have turned her father’s antisemitic, xenophobic protest movement into a party of government.
The man she named to replace her as president of the FN, Jean-Francois Jalkh, was outed as a Holocaust-doubter and Vichy-fancier and resigned after a couple of days. One of her final setpiece speeches, praising the glories of France, had a section plagiarised word for word from a speech given last month by the defeated centre-right candidate, Francois Fillon.
Many French hard left voters say they will abstain on Sunday on the grounds that there is no political or moral difference between Ms Le Pen and the untried, pro-market, pro-European favourite Emmanuel Macron. As a result, the margin of Mr Macron’s victory may be narrower than many people in France had hoped for — hobbling his chances of winning a clear mandate in the national assembly elections next month.
Opinion polls suggest that Mr Macron, 39, will win on Sunday with 59-60 per cent of the vote — the widest margin in any French presidential election since Ms Le Pen’s father scored 18 per cent in the second round against Jacques Chirac in 2002.
The polls have shifted slightly in Ms Le Pen’s direction during the two weeks of the second-round campaign but the smallprint of the surveys suggests that she has made few actual converts. The increase in her projected score from 37-40 per cent to 39-41 per cent is based almost entirely on a larger than expected wave of “ni-ni” — neither-nor — feeling on the left of the French Left.
The opinion polls predict a turnout of 72 to 75 per cent. Participation would have to fall below 60 per cent to give Ms Le Pen hope of victory.
The small shift in the polls has nonetheless played on the nerves of the French “establishment”, which fears the kind of surprise which awaited the Remain camp in the Brexit referendum in the UK and Hillary Clinton’s supporters in the US presidential election. A Le Pen victory would arguably be a more destructive shock to the European and international status quo than either Brexit or the election of Donald Trump.
But opinion polls were uncannily accurate in the first round on 23 April. They have remained stable in predicting a Macron victory by around 20 points — a much wider gap than the Remain or Clinton camps ever enjoyed last year.