The Economist’s election modelling should cheer Emmanuel Macron

MOROSITÉ, MALHEUR, dégagisme: these are gloomy times in France. Covid-19 may be on the way out, but it still hampers daily life and the smooth running of the economy. Inflation, driven by disease-induced supply-chain kinks and spiking natural-gas prices, threatens household budgets. Russia and Ukraine are on the brink of war. Small wonder that only 17% of the French think 2022 will be better than 2021, and that some 45% intend in April to cast their first-round vote for a presidential candidate from the political extremes. Yet despite it all, President Emmanuel Macron has a four-in-five chance of winning re-election, according to that we launch this week.Our forecast is the latest in a series of statistical models we have built that use data about the reliability of past polling to analyse elections still under way. In America’s presidential contest in 2020, for example, we gave Joe Biden a very high chance of winning even if the polls were off by more than usual. In Germany’s elections last year we calculated a fair chance of success for the Social Democrats, who now lead the government there. And in 2017 we found that Mr Macron was extremely likely to defeat Marine Le Pen even though pundits maintained she had a good chance of prevailing. In short, our forecasting models have proved their worth.