Why It's Hard for Le Pen to Pull a Trump

(Bloomberg View) -- Can Marine Le Pen still win the French election if her opponents don't vote in the run-off vote on May 7? After many potential Hillary Clinton voters, certain of her victory, failed to turn out last year, Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, so, by analogy, such an outcome seems somewhat possible. Yet there are strong reasons why the French election is different from the U.S. one and Le Pen's potential path to victory is much narrower than Trump's. 

The first of these reasons is that French pollsters have done a far better job in predicting election results than their peers in the U.S.

Many state polls, particularly in the Midwest ones Trump surprisingly won, overestimated how many Democrats would vote. In France, the polling firms predicted the first round result with high accuracy while underestimating the expected turnout. As late as April 19, reputable firms such as Ifop and Cevipof predicted a 72 percent turnout; even that was considerably higher than their late March predictions, which gave rise to speculation that Le Pen might end up getting a higher percentage of the vote than polls had indicated. On election day, however, 78.69 percent of French voters showed up.

That's still not a very high turnout by the standards of the Fifth Republic's nine previous direct presidential elections. Voter participation was lower in only three of them. But it's still a respectable result in line with previous ones, no "black swan."

Two-round elections have different dynamics than single-round ones. A voter who has already engaged enough with the process to cast a vote once has an incentive to finish what he or she started. Tactical voting is not an anguished choice between imperfect alternatives because there's no better option -- it's the norm after people vote their conscience in the first round. So, in the run-off, voter activity usually picks up. There were only two exceptions to the rule -- the very first of the direct elections, in 1965, won convincingly by Charles de Gaulle against Francois Mitterrand, and the first post-de Gaulle one, in 1969, in which Georges Pompidou crushed Alain Poher, 58 percent to 42. That year, many leftists boycotted the second round; the Communists in particular declared that there was no difference between the two moderate candidates. Besides, Pompidou's advantage in the first round had been overwhelming: He'd won almost twice as many votes as Poher.

In a way, the current election is a bit like the 1969 one. Disappointed left-wing supporters of Jean-Luc Melenchon and Benoit Hamon equally dislike Le Pen the nationalist and Macron, a former banker. Polls give Macron a 60-40 advantage in the run-off, so some people may not be motivated to vote just to stave off the nationalist-populist threat. In line with that resemblance, pollsters are predicting a lower run-off turnout -- again about 72 percent. It's possible, however, that, like in the first round, they're merely erring on the side of caution.

Besides, even a turnout under 70 percent like in 1969 shouldn't lead to a Le Pen victory based on the current analyses of voter preferences. These were highly accurate before the first round: After Trump and Brexit, French pollsters did their best to take into account hard-to-reach voters, such as the young, the old and rural residents. There's no reason to believe the models will suddenly break down in the next 10 days. 

According to an Opinion Way poll released on April 25, a plurality of Fillon supporters, half of Melenchon voters and three quarters of Hamon backers are expected to go to Macron. Though some disappointed voters now say they intend to abstain, no more than one-third of them are likely to do so. Besides, 29 percent of those who abstained in the first round now intend to vote for Macron; 9 percent will back Le Pen.

To win, Le Pen, who was less than three percentage points behind Macron in the first round, needs to win pluralities of the strongest losing candidates' supporters or pick up a big majority of some candidate's "orphaned" voters. There is no indication at this point that this is about to happen. Given the inflexibility of Le Pen's platform and image, there's not much she can do to win over additional voters. The French know who she is and what she stands for. Not even a terrorist attack, which could theoretically push voters toward her anti-immigrant view, is likely to change anything: the Champs Elysees attack in which a police officer was killed just days before the first round did not boost her campaign.

Macron, of course, can always shoot himself in the foot, and he's already made a mistake by holding a celebratory dinner at La Rotonde -- not a place where a majority of French voters can afford to eat. So far, he appears to be holding his own -- even when Le Pen ambushed him at a closing Whirlpool factory in Amiens, he managed to win some supporters among the disgruntled workers. But even if he stumbles -- something he avoided during the dirty and intense campaign that preceded the first round -- it may ultimately work in his favor. Macron's poll lead has lately shrunk a little, though it's still comfortable; if that trend continues over the next week, more Le Pen opponents will be motivated to turn out and back the alternative.

In other words, Le Pen's path to the presidency is so narrow that her victory falls in the "black swan" category. The inventor of the term, Nassim Taleb, has pointed out that once media start discussing certain improbable events, their likelihood is often overestimated. That's probably the case with all the alarmist stories of a low turnout leading to a Le Pen win.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at lbershidsky@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mike Nizza at mnizza3@bloomberg.net.

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