Does Le Pen still have a chance to win?

The latest prices at Smarkets give Marine Le Pen around a 7% chance of upsetting the odds and winning Sunday's French presidential election run-off. Is there any reason to think she might still win?

Short answer: No.

The latest odds are exactly in line with the polling-based forecast at The Economist. Macron is, on average, about 10 points ahead in the polls and, if anything, his lead seems to be increasing. So far there is no reason to think that Wednesday night's debate is likely to change very much. There is of course a chance the polls might be wrong but this would represent one of the biggest (perhaps the biggest?) political polling failure of all time. The polling for the first round of the election was pretty close to the final result (with the exception of Mélenchon's over-performance).

Back in 2017 the polls generally over-estimated Le Pen's second round score; the final averages predicted her to be on around 38% as compared to her actual figure of 34%. Perhaps this is one small ray of hope for Le Pen backers - if the polls were that far wrong but in her favour this time, we could be set for a very close result. If that does happen, I imagine we will be talking about how many Mélenchon supporters simply chose not to vote in the second round.

It's interesting to compare the betting markets for this election to the 2017 version. On the eve of the second round in 2017, Le Pen was given around a 15% chance of winning despite the fact that she was around 25% behind in the polls. This time, the polls are much closer but the markets give her far less chance of winning. I think the explanation here is the fact that 2016 had seen the surprise Brexit and Trump wins and the betting public (sometimes the same people who'd made money on those other two events) sensed another populist upset. Many people at the time had pointed out that the 2017 odds appeared to hugely overstate Le Pen's chances. The 2022 markets seem much more rational.