Marine Le Pen

The way the French presidential election works is that there’s two rounds, with the top two finishers from the first round facing-off again in the second, unless one of them garners over 50% in the first round. In the history of direct presidential elections over the course of the Fifth Republic, no candidate has ever passed 50% in the first round. The closest anyone has gotten was Charles de Gaulle back in 1965 with 44.65% (this also happened to be the first direct presidential election of the Fifth Republic). Therefore, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by saying there will be two rounds once again this year.

Polls show Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front (or Front National, if you prefer to use the French styling), and Emmanuel Macron, who leads a party he created, En Marche!, both on track to advance to the second round. You guys can correct me if I’m wrong, but every single poll that I’ve seen shows Le Pen losing in the second round. Her dad, who ran the National Front before her, got stomped back in 2002 when he unexpectedly made it to the finals against Jacques Chirac. The guy lost by 20 million votes, in fact.

However, Marine is not her dad. In fact, she’s making a lot of globalists very nervous that she might actually pull this one off somehow. The BBC World Service was kvetching over it just the other day when I was tuned in. She definitely has an uphill battle, though.

French centrist Emmanuel Macron has slightly increased his lead on far right leader Marine Le Pen in the first round of the French presidential election, an Elabe poll of voting intentions showed on Tuesday.

The poll, conducted after a Monday night televised debate between Macron, Le Pen and three other leading candidates showed him leading in the first round by 26 percent against 24.5 percent for the National Front leader.

This was an improvement of 0.5 percent in his position in an Elabe poll on Monday conducted before the debate, while Le Pen lost 0.5 percent.

The poll showed Macron beating Le Pen by 64 percent to her 36 percent in the second conclusive round.

Can she pull off a big victory on May 7th, assuming she gets to the second round? The odds are stacked against her, certainly. But they were also stacked against now-President Donald Trump. Her supporters are just as devoted and as is the case with most elections, it comes down to turnout. Mainstream media is stacked against her just like it was for Trump. So she will get no breaks there. Still, I wouldn’t count her out just yet.

TheRalphRetort.com will live-streaming on April 23rd for the first round results, as well as the aforementioned second round on May 7th. I had a lot of fun with the Dutch Election stream and I want to see if we can duplicate it. In the grand scheme of things, the French elections are even more important for the future of European populism and the European Union.

It should be very exciting!