As the smoke cleared following the first round of France’s presidential election on Sunday, the most significant political speech of the night was arguably delivered by one of the losers. After coming unexpectedly close to beating Marine Le Pen to second place in the race, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the hard-left leader of France Unbowed, urged his supporters not to vote for her in the runoff between Emmanuel Macron on 24 April. “There must not be one single vote for Le Pen in the second round,” said Mr Mélenchon.
The bluntness of the message indicates the gravity of a political moment that feels alarmingly unpredictable and unreadable. Mr Macron secured 28% of the first-round vote. His four-point lead over Ms Le Pen was actually slightly bigger than five years ago, when he went on to win their head-to-head confrontation by a landslide. But the context of 2017 – when Mr Macron was seen as a fresh-faced liberal insurgent promising democratic renewal, and Ms Le Pen was struggling and failing to detoxify her brand – no longer applies. This time round, polls suggest a far tighter contest in two weeks, with some suggesting that the gap between the two candidates is within the margin of error; for the first time in the 64-year history of the Fifth Republic, the French far right has a genuine – if outside – chance of winning the presidency.
