Will Bescanot prevent Sego getting to the final run-off?

This is Olivier Besancenot, the 33 year old postman who might have a crucial part to play in the French presidential election a week on Sunday. He’s standing for the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR), the French section of the Fourth International and five years ago he gained 1.2 million votes or 4.25% of the vote.

This was several times the gap that the far right leader, Le Pen, had over the Socialist’s, Lionel Jospin. In that fight, as we all know, Jospin got squeezed into third place and did not make the final run-off.

Some polls show that his current support is at 2002 levels and given the recent polling set-back for the Socialist’s Royal Olivier could cream off enough support to deny a socialist candidate a place on the final ballot yet again.

One of our regular contributors, Chris from Paris, posted this afternoon that Le Monde has published an interesting paper with interviews of major pollsters :- “… explaining the difficulty of polls, they seem to try to cover themselves in case of a new shock. in particular they all consider “possible” an elimination of Royal through a surge of votes for far-left candidates and/or le pen. They continue to announce a royal/sarkozy 2nd round but…they “hedge” this prediction with a “plan B” : a Le pen/Sarkozy 2nd round”

So the Le Pen scenario discussed here yesterday is being given some credence. If the polls show that Royal is struggling then it might encourage far left voters to stick with their man.

Whatever it’s going to be an interesting final 11 days and the postman could yet have an impact as big as he did in 2002.

On the Spreadfair spread-betting market which gives 25 points to the winner and 10 to the runner up the latest prices are: Sarkorzy 19-20.1: Royal 8.8-9.8: Bayrou 5.6 – 6.6: Le Pen 0.5-0.7. I got on Le Pen at 0.4 which could produce a nice profit if he gets there. Bayrou looks like an interesting buy given that this betting would produce a profit if he made it on to the second ballot as well as 25-6.6 * stake if he wins.

Mike Smithson