Conventional wisdom holds that Emmanuel Macron will defeat Marine Le Pen in the second round of French presidential elections on April 24. That said, Macron still faces some risks that could set him back and propel Le Pen to a surprise victory. Readers in France and the EU, who are almost certainly better informed, will be encouraged to correct me as I deal with some issues.

On a very simple basis, a development that could dim Le Pen’s prospects is that the momentum she has been showing appears to have stalled as the first round draws to a close. Le Pen has been speaking out against Macron in recent weeks, As this FiveThirtyEight statistic shows:

The penultimate poll showed Le Pen trailing Macron by 3%-4% in the run-off, with more than 1,800 voters from Elaba polling ahead of the polls. The gap is just 1%, with Macron at 26% and Le Pen at 25%. Here is the actual count:

As a result, Le Pen trails Macron by more than 4 points, at the low end of the pre-election polling average. Granted, that bias is still within the margin of sampling error, but those hoping for a French version of the “Trump Shy” poll will be disappointed.

However, other factors make it clear that Le Pen is largely a real contender. The first is that rabid anti-immigrant Zenmour voters have nowhere to go, and they would certainly support Le Pen over him. Centre-right Pecques suggested her fans vote for Macron. Pécresse has been making an anti-immigrant dog whistle, so I don’t expect all her supporters to support Macron.

YouGov, the only pollster to predict the Brexit referendum will succeed and continue to be very reliable in the UK, found Macron with just a 2% advantage in the second round of voting, in what the new politicians called a “statistical dead end”. YouGov also looked at how voters for other candidates stood out in the second round. A key finding was that a large percentage of Mélenchon voters would support Le Pen in the second round. From The New Statesman:

However, YouGov predicted Zenmour to score 13% compared to his 7%, while Mélenchon predicted 16% compared to his 22% yesterday. While YouGov expects Mélenchon’s voters to be split between 55 percent Macron and 45 percent Le Pen, that’s a far cry from the almost 100 percent support for Le Pen’s Zenmour followers.

However, the new politician believes that Macron has reached his peak, while Le Pen has more potential:

“All of our data suggests that the second round is too close now,” said Paul Heard, founder of Datapraxis. “Le Pen’s reserves – those who were on the sidelines in the second round but thought Macron would be worse – were more positive about her and could be mobilized more easily, and Macron’s so-called reserves – Many of those voters on the left – and mostly hate him. He’s close to his ceiling, but she has room to grow. Whatever happens, it will be the best result ever for the French far right.”

Now consider wildcards:

debateAt the end of the first round in 2017, Le Pen was better against Macron than yesterday, trailing by less than 3% and now by more than 4%. But her debate performance was appalling, with only 34 percent of the vote in the second round. Since then, Le Pen is said to have come a long way as a politician. But from what I’ve heard from the media, she still gets tricky when asked about Putin,¹ If she tacitly does this in the debate, it will definitely hurt her.

The sound of energy pain from GermanyFrance gets less than 20% of its natural gas from Russia, so its biggest risk is a diesel shock, which would still hit fishermen, truck drivers and commuters with long drives. However, Germany’s graded energy contingency plan requires companies to cut spending early, with some big companies warning of huge permanent losses. A sharp slowdown in Germany will also have to pull France down. Loud warnings of looming dark times for the German economy could cool already tepid enthusiasm for Macron.

French NATO officials or diplomats were captured by Russia or found dead at the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol.

Everything in Mariupol is a bit murky, but as far as I can tell, there are still about 4,000 Ukrainian troops who have been pushed back into the industrial area of ??the town near the port, where the largest resistance group is at the huge Azavstal steel plant. Macron called Putin twice about the “humanitarian” evacuation, the second time on March 29. Putin agreed, on the condition that any forced members of the armed forces lay down their arms. That was a non-starter.

Simultaneously, Ukraine has repeatedly tried helicopters to rescue factories, if I count correctly, five were shot down. At this point, helicopters and helicopter pilots are a scarce resource for Ukraine, so whoever they try to extract from the factory is of high value. There was a crazy-sounding report yesterday, Except that it does come from the Russian Ministry of Defense The Ministry of Defense strikes me as too unimaginative to deliver the “I’m crazy” message from a cargo ship trying to evacuate Azov battalion members from a steel mill.

What does this have to do with France? Reports and pictures showed that one of the helicopters that was shot down had two dead with French identity cards. Rumor has it that there are other fur traders in that factory. Representative of the Russian Duma He blinked, nodded and said, 100 might be a good number, they were NATO instructors, and they were discussing withdrawal with them every day. Clearly, if these negotiations go on for that long, there will be a fundamental stalemate.

If these non-Ukrainian agents are indeed NATO employees and not mercenaries, then that would make NATO and the individual countries sponsoring them unrecognizable. This could also explain why Russia has not attacked factories. Those goals would be of enormous value to them alive, whether as a topic of discussion at the UN Security Council or later in Russia’s planned war crimes trial.

It wouldn’t help Macron if these trapped mystery men were arrested before the election and were French and operating in some official capacity.

So stay tuned! A lot can happen in the next two weeks.

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¹ Putin had some nice things to say about her, “she’s a woman of faith” (note, so is Russia’s current arch-enemy, Victoria Nuland), campaign money lent to Le Pen by a Russian bank, which is widely described To lend her money for the equivalent of Putin, who himself is not responsible for every action taken in Russia.