I think you're going to lose that bet, Bootstoots. I really, really don't see Hamon going to the second round. And the only hope of stopping a Le Pen win is Hamon quitting for Melenchon, which I have little hope of. All the other candidates are not "change candidates", and that is what is required now. Perhaps the french are not as tired as the americans (wealth inequality there is much less, despite all that Sarkozy, Hollance, Macron, etc have been trying to do), but they can see where the world was going, where Europe is going, and they don't want to go there.
There won't be a majority voting for a french thatcherite (and a crooked one at that), and there won't be a majority voting for a new Hollande. Le Pen will beat either Macron or Fillon, that is my guess now.
Fillon could have played the "new Chirac" role with some care, but he's too arrogant and too badly burned to pull that out. And Macron is the media darling meant to win... but people take exception at that, and I can see the left staying home rather than voting for him in the second round. The more is is painted as the golden boy, the greater that reaction.
Inno was wrong this time, but that doesn't stop him from being one of my favorite posters on the site. Opinions like his are precious to me - I'm a fan of there there being opinions that step outside of things like simplistic identity politics, or dichotomous American-style crap, and analyze the situation from a genuinely different standpoint. I much prefer wrong-but-interesting people to right-but-boring ones.
I get where he is coming from here - the (neo-)liberal/globalist political establishment really is deeply unpopular, and for good reason. It may not be monolithic, but different groups within it disagree mostly on details rather on than the underlying structure, so I will refer to it in the singular. For decades, it has been systematically increasing within-country inequality while making the majority of people's lives more precarious on a near-global scale. This takes number of forms. For instance, it makes developed-country workers compete with much poorer counterparts elsewhere while pocketing the resulting profits. It also takes some of those poor people from poor countries and imports them domestically in order to create an underclass of culturally/racially-different, non-citizen (more easily exploitable) competitors so as to squeeze working-class citizens, then insults those people by calling them bigots when they complain about the situation either culturally, racially, or economically. Still, while paying homage to diversity in theory, it destroys it in practice - for instance, in the United States, by systematically discriminating against Appalachian residents, other southerners, black people showing any trace of black culture, Native Americans from all cultures, all the different varieties of Hispanics, all the different varieties of Asians, and so on in preference to people speaking General American accents who are good fits for the elite monoculture. I could go on and on with both left- and right-wing complaints about the global elite and how the system is structured, but you get the gist.
And in Europe, it's even worse - not only is this sort of thing going on, but all the "united in diversity" countries with suitably diverse economies have been pegged to each other in a recreation of the gold standard - only without even the option of devaluing the local currency against gold! So they can't devalue with each other, and structural creditors and debtors tend to remain that way forever, with little option to restructure in any way other than to cause a massive economic depression. In the only case where the non-mainstream left managed to win an election anywhere in the Eurozone, following such a depression, they just fussed and moaned for about 6 months before surrendering to a program that can never work, and that was made even worse to punish the fussing and moaning, even though they were being advised by one of the world's foremost political economists*. There are good reasons to think the non-establishment right might have more balls than that.
Something like 2/3 of all people everywhere in the West are dissatisfied with the status quo. If enough of them could be united, they could swing the whole system to try something truly different (not necessarily 'better', but different) in any democratic country. As it is, though, they are fractured in a variety of ways that are easy to exploit. Only 24% of French voters thought Macron was a better choice than anyone else presented in the first round, but the FN is extremely unpopular among everyone who doesn't already vote for the FN, because of their neofascist past, their obvious dislike for French people of foreign descent and religion, the fact that Marine Le Pen advised by Phillipot is almost certainly the best they could possibly show and the next generation will be worse, and so on.
Despite all the complaints I've voiced above, I'm sure if I were French, I'd have wandered into the polls wearing a clothespin and voted for Macron, provided enough quality red wine and cheese to make that choice seem palatable even with a clothespin. If they don't let you show up obviously drunk and/or wearing a clothespin, I'd have had to abstain or cast a blank ballot, but I'm pretty sure I'd not have voted for Le Pen despite serious consideration.
As it is, I knew enough about French voting behavior from the Dec 2015 regional elections and, later, from polls of Fillon and Melenchon's voters that I could max out a $3000-limit credit card (in stages, getting worse and worse over time) and still rest easy knowing that I'd net +$1000, triple my losses from the Trump election. If Le Pen had taken over the French Republicans (fka UMP, fka whatever, fka the Gaullists) during the primary rather than running for FN, she'd probably have gotten 35% in the first round and I'd never have bet against her in the second. It's those crucial ~15% of people who will vote for a right-wing nationalist who passes him or herself off as a conservative that really matters, here. Le Pen did not have those people, and she was clearly going to be crushed the same as 18 months ago.
*Political economy is broader, and much rarer in this day and age, than economics. Economics is a way to use simplistic models to justify a particular type of political economy, papering over the simplistic nature by using equations and pretending to be physicists who actually know what is going on. Political economy is where it's at - the moment I hear someone talking political economy rather than economics, I
listen. Especially if they managed to fool academia into calling them regular economists, then wrote books about political economy from the perspective of someone who actually does grasp the mathematical modeling BS well enough to know it's BS, then managed to get into a finance ministry anywhere. With that one exception, political economists are generally kept in humanities departments so they can't actually get anywhere and convince anyone who matters that things can be different.
c'est bon
