France is going to the polls on Sunday. Despite widespread criticism of poor programmes and dull speeches, the campaign has had some interesting developments in the last few weeks. The lead of François Hollande has remained largely uncontested, but the conditions of his much-awaited victory have slightly changed, essentially due to the surge of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. This raises the broader question of whether Hollande’s fortunes would be purely accidental, as commentators have been repeating for months.

It is first of all worth mentioning how rightwing candidates have fared in the last weeks. While he was still trailing Hollande by a significant margin in February, Nicolas Sarkozy made a short-lived comeback. His campaign launch was quickly followed by the robust handling of the Toulouse shootings. This helped him drain some voters from both Marine Le Pen and the centrist candidate François Bayrou. But his campaign dynamics have stalled and his performance on Sunday is unlikely to affect the final outcome: seven major opinion research institutes predict Hollande’s victory on 6 May by a margin of 57 to 53 per cent.

Bayrou made a staggering third man in 2007. Yet the magic of his commonsense approach seems to be gone. Voters understand that his choice of departing constantly from both the right and the left carries no weight. Many centre-left voters who turned to him in 2007 will vote for Hollande.

As for Le Pen, most pundits predicted six months ago a ‘vague bleu marine’ (a navy blue wave) in spring 2012. Certainly, the daughter could score as high as her father in 2002, at around 17 per cent. Yet, this will not have the same consequences. Her strategy of normalising the FN as a mainstream patriotic party has reached its limits. For instance, she fails to convince about the credibility of her solutions to the eurozone crisis.

Therefore, the real surprise of this campaign has been Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Nothwithstanding the candidate’s oratory, he has been able to rally former PS members who had abstained at previous polls under the ‘Front de Gauche’ banner, As the political scientist Pascal Perrineau puts it, Mélenchon has stirred up a communist culture that is still deeply rooted in France.

Where does this leave Hollande? He might perform a bit lower than expected on Sunday given Mélenchon’s dynamics. A high score by the latter (above 15 per cent) could force him to reach out to the far-left. Nevertheless, he is most likely not to radically change his politics of equilibrium between a realistic centre-left and a more idealistic one. That should be enough for him to win on 6 May.

It is commonly said that the socialist candidate will be elected by default, only thanks to anti-sarkozyism. To be sure, a fair chunk of Le Pen’s and Bayrou’s electorate will refuse to vote for the incumbent president in the run-off. Moreover, qualitative surveys reveal widespread doubt about Hollande’s leadership capacity. However, that should not suffice to dub him an ‘accidental president’. Hollande’s vision might not be radically innovative, but his campaign was tailored-made for a victory of the left. At the PS primary election last October, he convinced moderate voters that he would get serious about fiscal responsibility. Meanwhile, introducing himself as a ‘normal’ person and targeting the world of finance, he captured French people’s expectations of common decency and equality, a value that is at the centre of his official campaign video.

All in all, Hollande has been a cunning campaigner; he does not deserve the disdain he has usually been treated with so far. The question is whether that will make him a great president and a longstanding inspiration for the European left.

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Renaud Thillaye is a policy researcher at Policy Network

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Photo: François Hollande