It's the middle of 2015, and contenders for the French presidency are already gearing up for the 2017 elections. The center-left and center-right both seem to be banking on strategies that could leave France with the worst of all worlds.
The upcoming French presidential election will likely revolve around three candidates: current Socialist president Francois Hollande, center-right challenger Nicolas Sarkozy, and surefire Front National candidate Marine Le Pen.
Of the three, Hollande is faring worst in the polls. In fact, by the current numbers he may well be the most unpopular president France has ever had. The current prime minister, Socialist Manuel Valls, is doing better in the polls than his political boss, but voters on the left don't yet trust Valls, a reform-minded firebrand.
On the center-right, former president Nicolas Sarkozy is seeking to avenge his loss to Hollande. By rebranding his political UMP party, now christened Les Republicains (The Republicans), he also hopes to neutralize voter angst about him.
For now, Sarkozy's efforts are failing. At just the moment he hoped to begin a phoenix-like rise to renewed political prominence, graft affairs implicating the former president popped up in the press. Alain Juppé, a former prime minister, is doing better in the polls than is Sarkozy, who is the party leader.
The most unencumbered candidate at the moment appears to be Marine Le Pen. Le Pen expelled her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, from the party he founded after he refused to disavow repeated racist remarks about the Holocaust. With her father's forced departure, Marine Le Pen hopes that she will have once and for all dispelled any lingering doubts about her revamped, non-racist Front National.
Le Pen is banking on the weakness of Hollande to beat him in the first round of voting. That would lead to a rerun of 2002, when her father beat Socialist Lionel Jospin in the first round. He was then trounced by Jacques Chirac after leftist voters held their noses and voted for Chirac to keep the elder Le Pen out. In 2002, the Front National still occupied the extreme right, with its leader calling the gassing of the Jews in World War II "just a detail."
That made the Front National toxic - too toxic for even strongly conservative voters to vote for the party. Marine Le Pen wants a rematch of 2002, and if she gets it, she hopes to be at the helm of a party that won't scare voters as much as her father did.
Still, Le Pen's platform is strongly anti-immigration, staunchly nationalist, and hyperchauvinist. She wants France to leave the European Union, close its borders and return to the glorious days of French tax-and-spend étatism, while supporting Vladimir Putin. She's succeeding; these days more center-right voters find the Front National an acceptable alternative.
Back in 2002, Chirac (Sarkozy's political predecessor) wasn't very popular among leftist voters either, but at least he wasn't as toxic as Jean-Marie Le Pen. Nicolas Sarkozy, however, embodies everything that many center-left Francais despise. It is highly doubtful that such voters would turn out to support Sarkozy in a run-off with a Le Pen, as they did in 2002.
Marine Le Pen's best chance at taking the presidency is with Hollande and Sarkozy running as the official candidates for their parties. If around this time next year - one year before the elections - the polls look as bad for those leaders as they look today, they may have to consider stepping back and letting others carry the banner. Otherwise, France may actually wake up to a Front National president.
(AP photo)