The race is not yet won for Macron, believes Pierre Baudewyns.
Four days before the second round of the French presidential election, all the polling institutes on Wednesday gave outgoing President Emmanuel Macron the big favorite in his own succession, with up to 12 points ahead of his rival Marine Le Pen. .
Should we see this as a prediction of Sunday’s results? Since the use of polling institutes has become popular, they have never made a mistake when designating the final winner during the interval between rounds. “There is a relatively recent new deal in France with the appearance of analysis on all the polls, confides Pierre Baudewyns, political scientist at UCLouvain, specialist in the sociology of voting behavior. A whole series of institutes carry out surveys with samples often ranging from 1,000 to 2,000 people. These analyzes take the data, aggregate them and consequently the margin of error decreases. This makes these polls more reliable but does not make them an absolute science.”
