Part of the fascination of the French presidential election has been the inability of the media and the pollsters to predict the result with any real confidence. This seems to be because in France, more than in any other part of the EU, voters tend not to tell polling organisations their true intentions. The more right-wing the voters, the less likely they are to admit to voting for right-wing candidates.
In order to compensate for this factor, polling organisations adjusted their figures – or in stark terms, invented new figures – because past experience told them that their returns could not be trusted. The most striking example of this occurred in 2002, when at no point did the polls remotely predict the true result, just under 17 per cent, achieved by the far-right leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, to reach the second round of voting at the humiliating expense of former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. This was seen as a disastrous miscalculation by the electorate, who evidently believed that Le Pen was so far behind the other main candidates that they could safely express their deepest prejudices and vote for him.
This made the media particularly careful not to predict the early demise this time of perhaps the most improbable French presidential candidate, 55-year-old former Education Minister François Bayrou, better known as an enthusiast for Rudyard Kipling and for his thoughtful biography on the first French king to switch religions, Henry IV. A gentleman farmer from a tiny village at the foot of the Pyrenees, a centrist in political terms, in the last election Bayrou was eliminated in the first round with a fourth place showing of 6.84%. He says he wants to end the “caste system” in which France can never escape from a perpetual ruling elite, and to shift power back into the hands of parliament, a message that struck a chord with many voters.
Whatever the outcome of the election, Bayrou put firmly on the agenda what he describes as the “profound malaise” of the French political system. Arguing in favour of coalition government – his own party has only thirty deputies – he said that France was in need of “electric shock therapy” to create some kind of unifying force. “If they do not get it,” he predicted, “the country will explode”.
