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Writer's pictureMatthew Warren

President Juppé?

Updated: Aug 4, 2022


Alain Juppé in 2015. Author: Florencecassisi


Olivier Faure, leader of the Parti Socialiste, was on France Info yesterday insisting that the party is right behind its likely candidate, Anne Hidalgo. He was responding to this poll from Ipsos/Sopra Steria that shows her on a miserable 5.5% in the first round of voting.


He pointed out that if we were to base the outcome on polls taken six months in advance, France would now have Alain Juppé as its president.


Of course, I had to go and check whether this is right. I looked up polls in October 2016 and found this one carried out by BVA for La Depeche du Midi. Sure enough, there is Alain Juppé sitting comfortably at the top of the polls.


At that stage of the race, the centre-right candidate still hadn't been decided, so the poll uses options of former president Nicolas Sarkozy and Alain Juppé. Note that François Fillon, the eventual candidate, doesn't feature. Juppé is much more popular than Sarkozy as well as all other candidates, scoring an impressive 33-39% of first-round votes. Look how Emmanuel Macron at that stage was on a mere 11-14%.

Of course, we know what happened next. François Fillon became the candidate and saw his campaign engulfed in the fake job scandal. I remember at the time people in France telling me Macron would never win because he didn't have party backing. Of course, that ended up being one of the reasons he did win.


Today's polls have Emmanuel Macron sitting on a quarter of first-round votes and Eric Zemmour appearing to steal the right-wing thunder from Marine Le Pen? How will they look once we arrive at polling day in six months?

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