05 January 2017

Ignore the Pronos

Nobody knows

by Richard Pooley

On 10 June last year I sent the following email from France to friends and family in the UK:

“We voted last week.  I bumped into the mayor as I was posting the envelopes: “Deux votes pour Europe,” I told him.  He seemed pleased. But I think we’ll be a minority come 23 June.  My forecast if we Brexit:

1. The £ will plummet against all currencies and stay low for several months but then gradually return to its current level as everyone realises that the damage to the British economy is much more gradual and longer-term than predicted;
2. Cameron will resign, Boris will not replace him (May will) …”

Few recipients and not one of my French friends believed my prono (the shortened form of pronostic, meaning prediction, used by French sports writers and weather forecasters). So, for a while after the Brexit vote my status as a political pundit rose to vertigo-inducing heights.  I blame ShawSheet for my subsequent fall.  In an article on 13 October I assumed that the winner of the French Republican Party primary and hence the French presidential election would be Alain Juppé. I reported that a poll of those certain to vote in the primary’s first round on 20 November showed 39% supporting Juppé and 35% Nicolas Sarkozy.  Far behind on 12% was François Fillon.  He was “nowhere” I said.

I then escaped to southern Africa for a month of writing and research.  Shortly after I got back to France, Fillon won the first round of the primary with 44% of the 4.3 million votes cast.  Juppé came second with 29%. It was Sarkozy who was nowhere with 21%.  Fillon won the second round a week later with 67%.  I take little comfort from the fact that no one else in France predicted this result.  Not even Fillon.  He looked as surprised as Boris Johnson did on the morning of 24 June, although a lot more cheerful.

So, what does this tell us, other than that you should take any future pronos from me with a large pinch of sel?  My answer is simple: nobody knows who will be the next French president.  I have heard and read several distinguished British journalists in the last few days predicting that it will be Marine Le Pen. They may be right but their pronos are nothing but guesses and not very educated ones at that.  Why?  Because most French voters have yet to make up their minds.

I was back in the UK for Christmas.  I did not lack for political opinions from those same friends and family who I emailed in June.  If Theresa May were to call a British general election tomorrow, I would be confident in my pronos of who would vote for whom.  Yet only one French friend has admitted to knowing who he will vote for in April – Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Trotskyite ex-Socialist Government minister.  Everyone else has either expressed bewilderment or despair at the choice on offer. When I last looked there appeared to be at least 18 candidates.  I have thrown some of their names into discussions.  All have been dismissed as either weak, dangerous, opportunistic or unknown.

French pollsters continue to ply their trade.  A mid-December poll of voting intentions in the first round in April had Fillon on 29%, Le Pen on 25%, Emmanuel Macron on 18%, Mélenchon on 14% and Manuel Valls, the most likely victor of this month’s primary of the Socialist Party and its allies, on 12%.  Everyone else was…er…nowhere.  Yet on 20 December L’Express published a poll which said that Macron was the most popular politician in France.

I listened to Le Pen being interviewed on the radio on Tuesday morning this week.  She also took calls from listeners.  She was articulate and confident.  She was direct without being strident.  She says what she thinks even when she knows it is not what her questioner wants to hear (but many other listeners do).  Her fibs are delivered with panache: she insisted to a farmer that every euro spent subsidising French agriculture under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy is actually French money.  The only other politician I have heard who sounds as confident that he knows what needs to be done is Emmanuel Macron, the ex-Economy Minister, who last year launched what he termed a new political movement of neither Left, Centre or Right – En Marche!  Could it be that the choice will come down to these two in the second round on 7 May?  I have a hunch it might.  But only a hunch.

Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed the ellipsis at the end of the opening extract from my 10 June, 2016 email.  Yes, there were more pronos:

… there will be a hung parliament and a minority Tory government after a general election this side of Christmas;

3. Labour will be the largest party after a general election in 2018 under a new leader but will only be able to govern in a coalition with the SNP/Lib Dems/Greens;
4. Scotland will be independent by 2020;
5. N Ireland will be independent of the UK but not part of Eire by 2024;
6. Unemployment in the UK will rise to 15% by 2025 as more and more service jobs are taken over by machines and the population rises to 80 million (EU and non-EU immigrants continue to fill jobs that Brits cannot or won’t do). 
7. Croatia win the Euro Football Championships (but this cannot be blamed on Brexit).

I think I should stick to my day job.

 

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