French Election: Path to Presidency would be tougher for Macron than it looks

For quite some time, we at FxWirePro have been warning against the complacency with regard to the French election. Most of the polls continue to suggest that the Independent centrist Emmanuel Macron would become the President of France by easily beating the Front National leader Marine Le Pen in the second round. The betting market is pricing more than 60 percent chance of a Macron Presidency. However, we believe that the path to Presidency would not be as smooth as it looks.

In this article, we are analyzing the polls based on pro-EU and anti-EU stance.

Most of the French candidates this year are pro-EU except for Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Dupont-Aignan. There are 11 candidates and only three are anti-EU. Based on the data from majority of the polls, these three anti-EU candidates will receive 43 percent of the votes in the first round and the rest eight will receive 57 percent. The anti-EU supporters are not likely to back a pro-EU candidate in the second round and that makes the math much tougher for Mr. Macron. If a large portion of the supporters of his pro-EU opponents choose to abstain, it would be extremely difficult for him to reach the 50 percent magic number.