Director of influential thinktank Fondapol believes Sunday's runoff may be closer than most people expect
As the French presidential election heads into the very final straight – campaigning stops at midnight on Friday – Professor Dominique Reynié, director of the influential Paris-based thinktank Fondapol, the Foundation for Political Innovation, believes Sunday's runoff may be closer than anyone expects.
Most opinion polls are giving Socialist François Hollande a lead of between 6% and 10% over the incumbent president, Nicolas Sarkozy. While Reynié still thinks the most realistic hypothesis is that Hollande will win ("barring a coup d'état" he says jokingly) he suggests it will only be by a whisker of 50.77% to 49.23%.
For Sarkozy to win he says three conditions have to be met: the president has to gain a large majority of the 6.4 million voters who supported the far-right Front National candidate in the first round; he has to win over more of centrist François Bayrou's first-round voters; and a large number of new voters, who abstained in the first round, have to come out on Sunday and vote for him.
"It will be hard, however, to reunite all three conditions and inverse the predicted result," Reynié admits. "If that happens it will be a real political exploit. We cannot talk of miracles, in a secular republic you don't win elections by miracles, but it would certainly be an exploit."
Fondapol has come up with the equivalent of the British swing-o-meter, a vote simulator that readers can have hours of fun playing with to create the voting conditions in which either candidate might win, taking into account the preferences of those who voted for the eight other first-round candidates and the level of abstention.
Reynié says he was disappointed by the campaign of both Sarkozy and Hollande, both of whom he says largely ignored the most important issue: how to reduce France's public deficit.
Of Sarkozy's decision to put immigration at the top of his agenda to pick up FN votes, he says the president was left with little choice after the first round result nearly a fortnight ago.
"It was impossible for Nicolas Sarkozy not to have tried to win those voters either. Either he gave up any idea of being elected there and then on 22 April, or he did what he did regarding the tougher stance on immigration and borders," Reynié said. "He had to go to the right."
He adds: "The question is whether he was right to have gone to the right long before the election campaign. The consequence of the president of the republic talking about these themes is to give them a certain legitimacy: and when it comes it comes to immigration and rejecting Islam there is only one champion and it's not Nicolas Sarkozy. This is Marine Le Pen's speciality.
"He (Sarkozy) could have made the choice of saying 'I am president of the republic, there is a very serious crisis in Europe and I know what to do. We cannot have a campaign that avoids that and we have to reduce the public deficit. I am not going to talk about anything else', but he didn't. Instead, they are talking about immigration, halal meat and the burka."
He concludes: "It will depend on whether immigration is the main issue in people's minds when they go to the polls on Sunday. Our research also shows that if the economic crisis is their main preoccupation, they will vote Nicolas Sarkozy. If they are thinking more about the cost of living, they will vote François Hollande."
Confronted with opinion polls and research showing contradictory findings, however, Reynié confesses: "Political science is not an exact science. I'm not pretending I know exactly what is happening in France."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/french-election-blog-2012/2012/may/03/french-election-race-to-line
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