Allons enfants de la patrie, la jour de gloire est arrivée

The first round of the French presidential election was held on Sunday (Saturday for voters in the overseas territories in the Americas and in French Polynesia), and here are the results:

*François Hollande (Socialist [blairite third-wayers]): 28.56%

*Nicholas Sarkozy (Union for a Popular Movement [tory teabaggers]): 27.07%

*Marine Le Pen (National Front [far-right nutbags]): 18.12%

*Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Left Front [jaurèsian socialists]): 11.1%

*François Bayrou (Democratic Movement [centrists]): 9.11%

*Eva Joly (Europe Ecology The Greens [greenies]): 2.26%

*Nicholas Dupont-Aignan (Arise the Republic [old-school gaullists]): 1.81%

*Philippe Poutou (New Anticapitalist Party [alterglobalisationalists]): 1.16%

*Nathalie Arthaud (Workers’ Struggle [trotskyists]): 0.57%

*Jacques Cheminade (Solidarity and Progress [larouchites]): 0.25%

The big takeaways are (1) Hollande is on track to win the presidency – every poll this month has had him leading at least 53-47 in the second round, to be held on May 6; (2) the major parties may have avoided a repeat of 2002, but the National Front scored its best ever first-round vote and isn’t going away any time soon; (3) Mélenchon has somewhat revitalised the ‘left of the left’, but fell short of the heights that polls had suggested he might achieve.

What does this all mean for France, Europe, and the world? Celebrations for France’s socialists and comparisons to François Mitterrand’s 1981 victory, followed more of the same old shit. The National Front’s momentum might turn a lot of parliamentary seats into three-way contests, helping the Socialists to an ever greater landslide and making them less dependent on the Left Front for support. Everything at this stage points to Hollande reprising Sarkozy’s role as Angela Merkel’s gimp.

And it could get worse: Marine Le Pen’s advisers have spoken of re-creating the FN, which sounds like they are planning to re-brand it in order to make it possible to ally with mainstream right-wing parties (their model would presumably be Italy, where the Alleanza Nazionale used the early-1990s political crisis to de-stigmatise its fascist heritage and make itself a major player in Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition). The prospect of an unpopular and worn-out Hollande facing a UMP-FN fusion in 2017 might be a possibility.

Stay tuned for more fun on May 6.