National front-runner: who can beat Le Pen?
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What is the current state of Marine Le Pen’s lead in the French presidential race?
The Economist. Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.
And I'm Rosie Bloor.
Today on the show, inefficiency and injustice in eastern India's buffer zone and why Argentina is so good at polo. First up, though.
It's election season in France, a time when politicians who normally wear suits and ties start venturing far from their usual
habitats.
A leading candidate from the centre-right recently turned up at a food truck in an apron to serve fruit to passers-by.
Another
one climbed to the top of a wind
turbine.
Yet another hopeful launched a tour of 1,000 bistros. All of them are desperately trying to get closer to voters and make inroads on the candidate who's currently soaring ahead in the polls, Marine Le Pen from the anti-immigration right-wing National Rally.
The election next April and May may seem a long way off, but it is absolutely a crucial moment for the French because for the first time in 10 years, Emmanuel Macron can't stand again. He's constitutionally barred from running for a third consecutive term. Sophie Pedder is our Paris bureau chief. And the poll favourite for this election is Marine Le Pen. Now, she was in the north of France as well, launching her own presidential bid.
With us, the French, whatever their skin colour or religion, their origin or residence, whatever their region or social condition, will be a priority for them.
And with seven months to go now, the presidential race has turned into what seems like a single question, and that is, who can beat Le Pen? So what do the polls show at the moment? Well, the polls have been remarkably stable. They show Marine Le Pen with a commanding lead in the low to mid 30s for the first round. It's a two round election. So the important thing is to qualify. And that is a big lead, at least 13 points ahead of her closest rival. Now, at the moment, that's Edouard Philippe. He was one of Macron's prime ministers, the first prime minister, in fact. But in each of the three runoff scenarios, so the final round, Le Pen wins, according to the poll. If she's pitted against Philippe in the final round, she would win by 55% to 45%, so not even close, which means that the French centre is struggling to come up with someone that they can all rally around and someone who has a strong chance of beating her.
How reliable would you say that polling is this far out from the actual election?
Well, it's an interesting one, Rosie, because actually, if you look back, polls have often been wrong at this time. Emmanuel Macron, for example, was hardly tested in the polls before his election in 2017. And there are some famous cases where candidates who looked like favourites, and I'm thinking of Édouard Balladieu in 1994 or even Alain Juppé in 2016, they just crashed out. So over the past three years, if you look at the polls, Le Pen has only once come in at below 30 percent, extraordinarily high and extraordinarily stable. And when I speak to people in the center, I spoke, for example, to Clément Beaune, who was a former Europe minister from Emmanuel Macron's party. He said that the difference between this election and previous elections is that it is possible this time for her to win.
So what is the opposition doing? Well, if you take the broad centre to mean a very wide space between the socialists on the left and the Republicans on the centre-right, there are at least 15 candidates. Some of those have already declared. Some of them are taking part in a socialist primary, so they're doing that in October. Others still have hinted that they will run. But this kind of fragmentation is incredibly damaging because ultimately it means that none of them might qualify at all. And instead, the French voters will be handed a choice between two extremes, and that would be Le Pen on the far right and Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the far left.
Aside from finding a candidate that the centre could actually unify around, what would they then have to do to beat Marine Le Pen?
Well, if you look at centrist candidates who have beaten populist right parties – and it has happened in a number of European countries –
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