In her prizewinning memoir The Years, the author Annie Ernaux recalled the collective panic on the French left in 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen unexpectedly made it to the runoff in that year’s presidential election. “Before we had time to think,” she wrote, “we were swept into the frenzy of a mass mobilisation to save French democracy.” A hastily assembled republican front ensured that Jacques Chirac, the centre-right candidate for the Élysée, won an overwhelming 82% of the vote in the second round. Progressive voters held their noses and did the necessary. As Ms Ernaux put it: “Better a vote that stinks than a vote that kills.”
Two decades later, it seems likely that Emmanuel Macron will need to rely on a similar spirit in this month’s presidential election. After a slow and fractious start to Marine Le Pen’s campaign, polls now suggest she has a good chance of achieving the far right’s best election result since her father founded the Front National in 1972. One recent survey placed her only three percentage points behind Mr Macron in a potential second round runoff. In a newspaper column designed as an urgent wake-up call, the former French prime minister Manuel Valls wrote last weekend: “It’s one minute to midnight … Marine Le Pen could be elected president of the republic.”
