French election: Don’t discount Le Pen based on just polls

All the presidential polls in France suggest that even if the Front National leader Marine Le Pen secures a victory in the first round of French election, she is sure to lose by big margins in the second.

But should we trust the polls?

One might point to the election of the US President Donald Trump and say that polls don’t matter or they fail to represent the true picture. While that is an argument, it is more of a simplistic in nature. Brexit happened but the polls were not as incorrect as they were in the US. The final polls were even correct in the Dutch election. The US election polls are not our argument here. Instead, we would like to point out a different set of polls.

In 2015, Politico conducted a poll, where 71 percent of the American respondents said they are not happy with the direction of the country and that poll is something which truly reflects on what happened on November 8th. The US President Donald Trump probably would have achieved a bigger victory, had his strong and sometimes bitter comments alienated lots of potential voters. For the French election, we would like to point out to another poll conducted by Pew Research Center across Europe, where only 38 percent of the respondents have favorable views towards the European Union. Now, Madame Le Pen is the only candidate who stands against the European Union. We are just concerned that French election polls do not reflect what Pew Research Center found out.

While we at FxWirePro, was able to correctly predict the outcome of the US election, we are unable to do so for the French election due to our lack of that much expertise in the area.

P.S. Anyone feeling cheerful after the Dutch election should note that the same Pew Research poll found that 51 percent of the Dutch respondents have favorable views towards EU.