10 days to go

Only ten days to go until the first round of the French Presidential Election. No matter who wins, it will be a significant break from the past where Mitterrand and Chirac have been involved in politics since the 5th Republic was founded, The new President will be a new man (or woman).

I blogged on the polls last week, and noted Sarkozy had led in the last 45 polls. A correspondent made the very good point to me that Le Pen should not be written off as historically people don’t admit to pollsters they will vote for him,but do. So some of those Sarkozy voters may vote Le Pen. I doubt Sarkozy is as vulnerable to this as Chirac was though.

So to recap there are four main candidates:

Nicolas Sarkozy, Union for a Popular Movement (right)
Ségolène Royal, Socialist Party (left)
François Bayrou, Union for French Democracy (centre)
Jean-Marie Le Pen, National Front, (far right)

This gives six possible combinations for the run-off. As I make no claim to be an expert on French politics, I’ll risk predictions and probability for each scenario .:

Sarkozy/Royal – 65%
Sarkozy/Bayrou – 24%
Sarkozy/Le Pen – 3%
Royal/Bayrou – 5%
Royal/Le Pen – 2%
Bayrou/Le Pen – 1%

And for each scenario, what is the likely outcome in the run-off:

Sarkozy/Royal – Sarkozy wins by 2% to 6%
Sarkozy/Bayrou – Bayrou wins by 4% to 8%
Sarkozy/Le Pen – 3% – Sarkozy wins by more than 55%
Royal/Bayrou – 5% – Bayrou wins by over 10%
Royal/Le Pen – 2% – Royal wins by more than 40%
Bayrou/Le Pen – 1% – Bayrou wins by more than 50%

It will be interesting to see if the polls change in the next week, and more so if they prove more accurate than in 2002.