Making the right call on France’s future president fraught with danger

While the conservative candidate is likely to beat Marine Le Pen in a presidential run-off, the assumptions behind this can no longer be guaranteed, writes Hugo Drochon

In the French Republican party’s presidential primary, François Fillon soundly defeated frontrunner Alain Juppé, winning close to 67% of the votes.

Two weeks ago, a landslide victory for the apparent underdog seemed out of the question. It had long been expected that Juppé, the mayor of Bordeaux and a former prime minister under former president Jacques Chirac, would beat the other frontrunner, former president Nicolas Sarkozy, in a second-round runoff.