Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Continental Europe Wins the Sanity Contest

The French election shows the strength and good sense of old Europe.

April 24, 2017 at 10:12 AM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Business as usual.
Photographer: Sylvain Lefevre/Getty Images

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I met Las Vegas lawyer Robert Barnes during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. Long before everyone else I know, he was betting -- literally, through U.K. bookmakers -- on Brexit and Donald Trump's victory. He made hundreds of thousands of dollars for himself and the clients he advised from these bets. In Sunday's French election, however, he says he merely broke even.

Barnes told me he'd bet on progressive centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-left Jean-Luc Melenchon to make the run-off round. At 20-1, he believed the risk-reward ratio was worth it. And lots of non-polling data were increasingly pointing toward Melenchon, just like they had been toward Brexit and Trump: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube engagement, mentions on the media, Google searches. Then, on Sunday morning, after watching Google search trends, Barnes added a separate bet on Macron to win the first round. That's how he narrowly avoided a loss.