“EURASIA GROUP and The Economist are frequently sympatico,” says Ian Bremmer, “but not on the French elections.” Mr Bremmer is the president of Eurasia Group, a risk consultancy. He recently took us to task on Twitter regarding our statistical forecast for France’s upcoming election. Our model calculates that Marine Le Pen of the National Front has a 1% chance of becoming the country’s next president. Eurasia pegs her probability at a far higher 40%, and Mr Bremmer wrote that our analysis was the “biggest mistake I’ve seen from them in ages”.

After seeing Mr Bremmer’s tweet, our data editor offered him a friendly wager on Ms Le Pen’s electoral fortunes, at the current price on the PredictIt betting market of 30%. After some back-and-forth, we have agreed to a bet at those odds: $60 on Mr Bremmer’s end if Ms Le Pen loses, $140 on our data editor’s side if she wins. Either way, the proceeds will be donated to Médecins Sans Frontières, a charity. However, the victor will also claim from the vanquished a fine bottle of Meursault wine. “Since we’re betting on Le Pen,” Mr Bremmer says, “a French white seems required”.

In addition to our wager, we have invited Mr Bremmer to share with our readers an explanation of how Eurasia Group reached its conclusion that Ms Le Pen has a 40% shot to win, and responded with an account of our own reasoning. We hope you enjoy the debate.

UPDATE: Following Ms Le Pen′s defeat, Mr Bremmer has kindly sent us an outstanding 2013 Domaine Bouchard Meursault Perrières Premier Cru. A tasting note will soon be forthcoming.

Why Marine Le Pen has a 40% chance to win

By Ian Bremmer and Charles Lichfield

Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front (FN), is likely to advance on April 23rd to the second round of the presidential election. While we do not believe she will ultimately win the presidency, her odds of victory are much higher than the 1% estimated by The Economist. In our view, it’s almost a coin flip. Why?

Any model “entirely based on polls”, like The Economist’s, fails to appreciate the roller coaster French politics has been taken on over the past year. Just about every scenario which was plausible under the normal rules has been crushed. French voters are in a “dégagiste” mood. No preordained scenario will do.

The political system is struggling to adapt. Instead of reversing the decay of mainstream parties, the primary process has accelerated it. The divisions and contradictions of the centre-left have become so obvious that the incumbent president, François Hollande, couldn’t seek his party’s approval to run for a second term. Thinking it could not lose, the centre-right picked a radical candidate, François Fillon, whom it is now stuck with despite layer upon layer of embarrassing revelations.

The FN has been steadily growing over the past five years, even in parts of the electorate which have traditionally been hostile to it. It is therefore no surprise that Ms Le Pen is the most likely to reach the second round—by a long way. But the appearance of Emmanuel Macron, an independent, liberal candidate in the centre, has taken everyone by surprise.

Voters are more perplexed than excited by the reshaping of the country’s politics. French pollsters, who do have an excellent track record, are registering record levels of undecided voters and—crucially—stronger mobilisation for Ms Le Pen than for any other candidate.

Turnout will be key to the outcome. Pollsters generally estimate that turnout will be in line with or above historic averages. But voter frustration and resignation may instead result in low turnout, which will almost certainly benefit Ms Le Pen.

It is assumed that Mr Macron, the centrist, is the ideal candidate to unify the right and the left in a “Republican Front” against Ms Le Pen. Simulated second-round polls support this assumption. However, since Mr Fillon’s scandal has placed Mr Macron as the de facto favourite, voters have become increasingly frustrated, and see him as a front for the unpopular administration of Mr Hollande. This is especially true for centre-right voters, who feel robbed. One-third of them are prepared to vote for Ms Le Pen over Mr Macron. Even more will abstain. Left-wing voters are also suspicious of Mr Macron and his liberalising designs. Fewer voters in this group will transfer to Ms Le Pen than from the right, but the reassuring polls may introduce a sense of complacency about the risk presented by Ms Le Pen, and could lead many voters to abstain or spoil their ballots.

Mr Macron has an advantage over Ms Le Pen, but only a very slight one. We haven’t yet entered the peculiar atmosphere of the entre deux tours. Mr Macron has tried to position himself as an anti-establishment candidate, but his efforts have lacked credibility. Social-media users have consistently criticised Mr Macron as a pet of the mainstream media. On the left, social-media users associate him with unpopular policies during Mr Hollande’s term, such as liberalisation reforms that undermined the economic security of ordinary French voters. On the right, they frequently call attention to Mr Hollande’s soft and uninspiring economic reforms.

Mr Macron’s attempts to firm up voters’ support have had mixed results. Eurasia Group’s social-media analysis—which combines volume-based and linguistic sentiment analysis—finds that Mr Macron has not been able to communicate his economic policies in a coherent or compelling narrative, despite it being his original area of expertise. His proposals are not connecting with citizens: on balance, social-media users are either critical of or indifferent to them. Ms Le Pen, on the other hand, has had much more success in connecting to voters on her key issues.

Ms Le Pen will make a violent charge against Mr Macron as the establishment’s final, desperate attempt to keep the FN out of power. Mr Macron will be forced to defend the European Union, immigration and “openness”—things a majority of voters are now suspicious of. There is also the risk of embarrassing revelations, which Mr Macron has avoided until now. His biggest vulnerability is his past in mergers and acquisitions. Any email showing him to be insensitive to the fate of employees could be toxic.

A run-off between Ms Le Pen and Mr Fillon is generally accepted as riskier. We don’t necessarily agree, given that Mr Macron’s first-round voters would be much more willing to partake in a Republican Front than Mr Fillon’s would. Voting in favor of Mr Fillon’s onerous reform programme will be unbearable for most of the left, especially given what they now know about his own lifestyle. Still, Mr Fillon has adopted Ms Le Pen’s rhetoric of “economic patriotism”, and is similarly hawkish on internal security questions, thus limiting her voter niche.

Why Marine Le Pen has a 1% chance to win

By The Economist

NOT long ago it was seen as proof of numeracy, not heresy, to say that a candidate trailing in the polls by 15 percentage points or more was exceedingly unlikely to win an election. No one gave Walter Mondale a snowball’s chance in hell when he lagged Ronald Reagan in surveys by 18 points in 1984, and went on to lose by 18 points. No one argued that Germany’s Social Democrats had a prayer of knocking off Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats in 2013, when polls put them 14 points down and they succumbed by 16. And no one bet on Jacques Chirac in France when he was a 15-point underdog to François Mitterrand in the first round of the 1988 presidential election. When the votes were cast, Mr Chirac cut his deficit to a mere 14 points.

As a result, we did not anticipate any controversy when we published the results of our French election forecast, which gives Marine Le Pen of the National Front a 1% chance of becoming the next president. To be sure, she is well-positioned to advance to the run-off, currently placing a close second in the polls. However, surveys of Ms Le Pen’s expected vote shares against her potential rivals for the second round on May 7th are downright brutal. Facing either the conservative François Fillon or the leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, she trails by 15 percentage points. And against her most likely opponent, Emmanuel Macron, her chances look even grimmer: he leads her by a whopping 26 points. It doesn’t take a degree in statistics to determine that such margins are next to impossible to surmount. As Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight recently noted, even a massive polling error in Ms Le Pen’s favour—as big as those in the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s presidential victory combined—would still leave her 12 points short.

Given these widely circulated polling numbers, we were surprised when Mr Bremmer announced that he regarded our conclusion as outlandish. We are extremely pleased to share Eurasia Group’s perspective with our readers directly. However, after digesting their analysis, we are sticking to our guns.

Our interpretation of the campaign differs from Eurasia Group’s on a few central points. First, Mr Bremmer and Mr Lichfield write that Ms Le Pen is “the most likely [candidate] to reach the second round”. Their firm’s final briefing on the election implied that she was guaranteed to advance to the run-off. In our view, such certainty seems complacent. Ms Le Pen’s polling numbers have actually been sinking of late. For the first time since January, she is now in a close but clear second place. Given the downward trend in her support—from around a 26% first-round voting intention earlier in the race to some 22% now—a qualitatively-minded analyst might even be tempted to speculate about the worrying implications for the National Front of such “negative momentum”. With just a narrow lead over Mr Fillon and Mr Mélenchon of two to three percentage points in The Economist’s polling average, it is entirely possible that one of them could dethrone her. We put the odds of her failing to make the final two at 35%.

A frequent argument advanced in defence of Ms Le Pen’s chances is that her supporters are more committed than are those of her opponents, and thus that she is likely to enjoy a turnout advantage on election day. Earlier in the campaign, there was some evidence to support this claim: at the start of February, only 44% of poll respondents who backed Mr Macron said they were certain about him. Today, however, the case appears much weaker. According to the final survey conducted by BVA, a French pollster, 73% of respondents planning to vote for Mr Macron in the first round now say their mind is made up.

Moreover, it is far from clear that the turnout battle is likely to favour Ms Le Pen, as Mr Bremmer and Mr Lichfield predict. Although her backers are still somewhat more solid than Mr Macron’s, they are no more loyal than Mr Fillon’s: for both of the right-wing candidates, 85% of their supporters say their decision is final. Mr Fillon may well be the most underestimated candidate in the race, as his rural, Catholic base is seen as highly reliable to show up to vote. And although Mr Macron’s support may remain soft in relative terms, his lead in stated voting intention is so enormous that Ms Le Pen has no hope to beat him on the strength of the enthusiasm gap alone. Even if every single National Front voter showed up to the polls but only 58% of Mr Macron’s did, he could still eke out a victory. In order to have a prayer against him, Ms Le Pen will have to persuade some of Mr Macron’s voters to switch sides—an extremely tall order, given the yawning ideological gap between the two candidates.

However, our disagreements extend beyond such fine-grained analysis. Eurasia Group’s assessment begins with the claim that “any model ‘entirely based on polls’ fails to appreciate the roller coaster French politics has been taken on over the past year”. Fair enough: there are indeed many relevant forms of information that polls do not necessarily capture. For example, they cannot incorporate the risk of another well-timed Russian electronic intervention. And as we noted in our briefing on the French election in this week’s print issue, this year’s campaign is structurally different from previous ones, because only one of the four leading candidates in the first round hails from one of the country’s traditional major parties. This added uncertainty could make polls unusually unreliable.

At the same time, just because polls can’t tell you everything doesn’t mean they don’t tell you anything. Given that Eurasia Group has published a quantitative prediction of Ms Le Pen’s chances at 40%, one might assume they had deployed a quantitative methodology to produce it. However, the assessment by Mr Bremmer and Mr Lichfield contains nary a mention of the ample polling figures available. The only data they cite—without providing specific numbers—is their evaluation of comparative enthusiasm for the candidates on social media, which they say favours Ms Le Pen over Mr Macron. That’s intriguing, and we would be eager to see statistical evidence based on past French elections showing that data regarding social-media platforms—which were already well-established during the 2012 presidential campaign—contributes additional, relevant information on top of polling and yields more accurate predictions.

That is a high bar to overcome, because the historical record of French pollsters is in fact impressively accurate. During the past six presidential elections, the average prediction of run-off polls taken just before the first round has missed the actual second-round result by a mere three percentage points. In 2012, pre-first-round surveys gave François Hollande around 54% of the run-off vote against Nicolas Sarkozy; he wound up getting 52%. Five years earlier, they foresaw Mr Sarkozy’s 53% to 47% victory over Ségolène Royal to within a single percentage point. And of course, run-off polls in 2002 had Jacques Chirac crushing Ms Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie by 78% to 22%; Mr Chirac actually received 82%.

Pundits will never run out of bromides, and the sound bite of the season is that a victory for Ms Le Pen represents an inevitable third coming of the global right-wing populist wave following Brexit and Mr Trump. However, French voters are telling pollsters by the hundreds of thousands that they plan to reject Ms Le Pen. Predicting that at least 15% and possibly 25% of them are likely to change their minds within the next two weeks is an extraordinary claim. It should require extraordinary evidence.