Pauvre France

[Workingman]

I do not know what the game is here, apart from the polls and media trying to 'manage' the result.

Yesterday the BBC published a Harris poll for a French TV station. It said that Fillon would beat Le Pen 66:33. Sky's poll showed that currently Fillon is on 26%, Le Pen on 24%, Hollande's lot on 9%, another centre left party on 13% and the far-left on 15%.

The two do not compute.

Actually I do know what they are doing. They will keep telling the French that Fillon is so far ahead of Le Pen, based on an assumption that those who would normally vote for the left will see that left-wing parties have no chance, and then hope to get them behind Fillon in order to stop Le Pen.

[Suff]

The French presidential election runs in two rounds. What they call "Voting the heart" then "Voting the head".

The two highest votes from the first round go into the second round and run off, head to head, where voters only get to vote for one or the other.

I like that because you don't get those surprise votes where a simple protest vote by 5% of the population winds up taking away key critical votes from a good candidate.

So the result they are predicting is round 2 where people, on the left, get to choose the lesser of two evils. It allows voters to vote for someone they would never normally vote for in order to avoid getting a candidate they simply can't stand.

Well it's different anyway...

[Suff]

Hollande has bowed out.

Cue cat with feathers in it's mouth....

Not that I think it will change the end result much. But it will add a bit more interest.

I'm not sure that Le Pen can't win. People are seriously mad about the whole immigration thing and even madder that when forced to do something it turns out they actually "can" move the immigrants on. They just "chose" not to.