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FORTY YEARS ago on May 10th, François Mitterrand made history, becoming France’s first Socialist president since before the second world war. At next year’s presidential election, the party the wily leader carried triumphantly to power in 1981 could make history again, but for rather a different reason. The Socialist Party runs the risk of failing to make it to the final run-off vote twice in a row.
A year ahead of any election, polls need to be treated with caution. French history is littered with early favourites Alain Juppé, Dominique Strauss-Kahn who never made it to the Elysée. A year before the presidential vote in 2017, the name Emmanuel Macron had not been tested in a single poll. An average of polls this year, which assume that Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, will be the Socialists’ candidate, suggests that the party would get just 8% in the first round. This would not be enough to get her through to the run-off. Wor
There’s nothing new in a sizeable segment of the military holding far-right beliefs and voting accordingly. In 2017, Le Pen took as much as 65% of the vote in areas close to barracks, compared to 33.9% nationwide. The older retired officers – like Martinez, 72, and Piquemal, 80 – are haunted by memories of the 1940 French surrender to the Nazis, the army’s defeats in Indochina and Algeria, and the 1968 leftist riots, which they see as the swan song of a more traditional France. The paratroopers, the foreign legion and the marine infantry units, from which many who signed the open letter hail, are especially known for their staunchly conservative