New poll has her neck and neck with Sarkozy

With just four days to go before the French Presidential election a new poll has Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal and Right-wing front runner Nicolas Sarkozy both on 50% should the two of the make the run off of the top two candidates. Sarkozy, however, is still in the lead for the first round of voting.

The pollster, CSA, has been giving slightly better figures for the Socialist candidate than the other firms. The last time that any pollster had Royal ahead was in January as the useful Wikipedia table shows clearly.

The critical thing though for both front runners is getting on the ballot for the final run-off. The far rightist, Le Pen is chalking up higher levels of support in the polls than at any time in the 2002 contest when of course, he managed to finish up in second place squeezing out the Socialist’s Jospin from the second round of voting.

In the betting Sarkozy is still a strong odds on favourite but has eased out to 0.58/1. Royal is at 3/1 which, as Nick Palmer has emailed me to suggest, now seems on the generous side given the closeness of the polls.

Labour now only 11% behind the Tories with Brown. As suggested yesterday the Times did hold over part of their April Populus poll – that relating to the Labour leadership. There will be relief in some parts of Labour that the “named leader question” showed that Brown’s Labour is now only 11% behind Cameron’s Tories. it was 13% last month. It is still the second highest figure recorded by the pollster and compares with the 8% on the main voting intention shares. A second question with Miliband had a Labour deficit of 12% – again an improvement from last month but most probably the result of growing name recognition.

PBC Party. I think that all those who attended yesterday’s gathering in London really enjoyed meeting up with fellow PBers. Iain Dale has an amusing item. I’ll run a special thread when people send me some pictures. The party was used to launch my book – “The Political Punter – How to make money betting on politics“. Click the link.

Mike Smithson