PARIS, March 28 (Xinhua) -- The results of France's upcoming presidential election will go beyond pollsters' expectations as an atmosphere of uncertainty still clouded the contest, a French expert has said.
"Given an important share of voters who are still undecided and those who will change again their minds, I think the results predicted ... by pollsters are doomed to be different of those to be announced after the vote," Thomas Guenole, a political scientist and professor at Sciences Po University, told Xinhua on Monday.
France's presidential election will kick off on April 23. A total of 11 candidates are competing for the presidency. If no candidate wins a majority of votes, the top-score contenders will meet two weeks later on May 7 for a run-off.
"The election is quite unpredictable because voters have become too unstable in their voting behavior. They decide much later. They hesitate much longer, and they have much less reluctance to vote for an unusual party for them," Guenole said.
He noted that building forecasts of voting intentions within a context of such uncertainty is "a professional misconduct," saying surveys released several months or weeks before the vote are doomed to be wrong.
An Odoxa poll released last Friday showed that nearly half of French voters were yet to make their final choices of which candidate they will support following an unpredictable campaign.
However, 74 percent of them said they would go to the polling stations for the first round of voting.
Unlike the 2012 presidential election, which had been a clear two-horse race between conservative incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist challenger Francois Hollande, the 2017 competition for the Elysee Palace remains difficult to predict.
In fact, a string of surprises started with outgoing President Hollande's decision not to seek a second term.
Additionally, fraud scandals have tainted far-right leader Marine Le Pen's bid and as well as that of conservative contender Francois Fillon, who has lost his top spot in the wake of a fake job affair, which is giving a boost to independent challenger Emmanuel Macron.
Recent surveys showed Macron would win the first round, with Le Pen taking the second place, sending the two to the May 7 run-off where Macron would comfortably beat Le Pen.
From a personal view, Guenole saw Macron as "a possible winner by default," although the youngest candidate who has never held an elected post "lacks charisma and is proposing a rather hazy right-left compromise."
"Macron is today a possible winner by default as right-wing candidate is handicapped by corruption and nepotism and the left is divided between two candidates," he said.
Asked whether Le Pen could make a shock win following a surge of populism in France, Guenole said the far-right leader is likely to lose the race.
"Marine Le Pen has no chance of winning the presidential election, for a simple reason that the share of voters who are ready to vote for anyone in the second round ..., as long as it is to beat Le Pen, is more than one out of two voters," he said.
