Why abstention could mean victory for Marine Le Pen

Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen are the two candidates heading into the second round run-off of the French presidential election on May 7. Initial polls gave a ratio of around 60/40 in favour of Macron. However, abstentionism may disrupt this logic. Physicist and Sciences Po researcher Serge Galam, who predicted the victory of Donald Trump as early as the summer of 2016, explains why.

Serge Galam is a research director of at the the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a researcher at The Centre for Political Research at Sciences Po (CEVIPOF). Galam is a physicist, theoretician, specialist in disordered systems, and founder of Sociophysics, a discipline which seeks to discover whether social and political behaviours obey quantifiable and discoverable laws.

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• 'How Marine Le Pen could win the French Presidential Election even if she polss lower than 50%', read the analysis by Serge Galam