French Head to Polls to Select Finalists After Grueling Campaign

EghtesadOnline: French voters cast their ballots Sunday to select two presidential candidates for the runoff round of the 2017 election, whose results have the potential to determine how far the populist wave in Europe will go.

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23 April 2017

In a campaign that has remade the nation’s political landscape, four candidates with radically different visions are in a position to qualify for the next round, according to dozens of public opinion surveys. They are Marine Le Pen, who wants to pull France out of Europe’s single currency, Jean-Luc Melenchon, who wants to remake the rules that govern that monetary union, Francois Fillon, a former prime minister who wants tough economic reforms and Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old centrist pro-European who has held a narrow but expanding lead for the past week, Bloomberg reported.

“For weeks, the French have been stating their frustration with an unsatisfactory campaign,” wrote pollster Bruno Jeanbart in a note for the Fondation Jean Jaures. “Ultimately they have to chose between four drastically different candidates with almost identical chances of success.”

The campaign has been long by French standards, kicking off in earnest last September as the Republicans held their first-ever primary contest, and it has overturned traditional French politics. Of the two parties that have run France for the past half-century, the governing Socialists have been reduced to an also-ran; their candidate, Benoit Hamon, is running in the single digits. The Republicans, led by Fillon, also may fail to make the runoff vote.

Polls open at 8 a.m. Paris time and then close at 7 p.m. in rural areas and 8 p.m. in big cities. Results will be released starting at 8 p.m. Sunday and the top two finishers of the 11 candidates will go into a runoff that will be decided on May 7.

Macron became the front-runner even though the party he founded is barely over a year old and he has never before held elected office. Jostling with him for first place is Le Pen, 48, who moved her father’s National Front party from unacceptable in polite society to the center of the conversation -- if still holding anti-immigration and anti-euro positions.

Fillon, 63, lost his lead in the polls after a legal tussle over whether he hired his wife for a parliamentary staff job for which she did no work. And Melenchon, 65 and from the extreme left, unexpectedly moved up to fourth place in part because his campaign featured extensive use of social media, not to mention appearances by hologram and a video game.

Before polling was suspended by law on Friday, Bloomberg’s composite of French polls showed Macron had 24.5 percent support and Le Pen was in second place with 22.5 percent. While Fillon and Melenchon have the backing of 19.5 percent and 18.5 percent of the electorate respectively, the margins of error leave room for an upset, pollsters say. Hamon is at 7 percent.

An extra element of uncertainty entered the campaign late Thursday when a man shot dead one policeman and injured two others in the center of Paris. The assailant was shot and killed as he tried to escape.

U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday in an interview with the Associated Press that the incident will “probably help” Le Pen because she is “strongest on borders and she’s the strongest on what’s been going on in France.” The nation has under a state of emergency since terror attacks in November 2015.

The French election comes as Frauke Petry’s Alternative for Germany party is riven by internal dissent five months before German elections and after Dutch voters gave Geert Wilders’s anti-EU Freedom Party 20 seats in the 150-seat lower house of parliament. He is not included in ongoing coalition talks. Before that, Iceland’s populist Pirate Party finished worse than expected in national elections.

Narrow Margins

The French election results could be so close that it may not be immediately clear which two candidates qualify for the May 7 runoff, campaign officials for Le Pen and Fillon said, with the assumption being that Macron would qualify.

Surveys show Le Pen would eventually lose to any rival in the second round. A late surge in support for Melenchon, who is backed by the Communist Party, has pushed French bond yields close to a four-year high. Melenchon would lose to Macron but would beat Fillon in the runoff, polls show.

Here’s a brief rundown of what happens when, in Paris’s time zone:

8 a.m. Sunday: polls open in mainland France

12 p.m. Sunday: Interior Ministry releases first details of turnout

5 p.m. Sunday: Interior Ministry updates turnout figures

7 p.m. Sunday: polls close outside major cities, counting begins

8 p.m. Sunday: Final polls close. Both the Interior Ministry and pollsters who participate in counts publish preliminary results. Historically these numbers have immediately showed who the finalists were, though races have rarely been this close, with this many candidates. Pollsters, among others, have struggled to cope with the tightness of the race and the high proportion of undecideds.

Results will roll in throughout the evening, but how long is anyone’s guess. Pollsters say Sunday’s final result may take hours after polling places shut their doors.