French elections: Coming this Sunday – Deutsche Bank

The research team at Deutsche Bank explains that the long awaited French Presidential Election is now nearly upon us with the first round taking place this Sunday.

Key Quotes

“Speaking to our expert Marc De-Muizon yesterday he informed me that we'll likely get exit polls soon after polls close at 7pm local time (8pm BST) with any delays caused by the fact that a few stations are open for an extra hour. It's also possible we'll get some earlier exit polls from across the border during the afternoon as they'll be banned in France while polls are open. Marc thinks that the only way we won't have a good idea of the rankings of the leading candidates within an hour or two is if all four main protagonists are clustered around the same mark. Quite possible.”

“In terms of the how the polls are looking, yesterday there was a lot of focus on a Harris poll which showed that support for Macron was running at 24.5% in the first round (compared to 23% ish in other polls) and support for Le Pen is at 21% (versus 22-23% in other polls).”

“Melenchon and Fillon came in with support at 19% and 20% respectively. It is probably worth handicapping this poll however given that the sample size was less than 1000 people and also that the poll is also a lot less regular than some of the more reliable ones including Opinionway, Ifop and Ipsos. Indeed if we look at the last 3 polls run by those pollsters then the spread between the four candidates is at an average of 4.5%. Macron’s average is 23.3%, Le Pen 22.3%, Fillon 19.7% and Melenchon 18.8%. So as we remark earlier it’s quite possible that these 4 candidates will be clustered together given that the spread is within the margin of error from previous elections.”