With just 24 days to go before the first round of French presidential voting, the political landscape has become borderline surreal, a dream state of self-induced hallucinations. The war in Ukraine has utterly overshadowed the vote. Any resemblance to an actual democratic contest might now be regarded as coincidental.
If the current polls are right, Macron will enter the second round with Marine Le Pen in a straight replay of 2017, with the same inevitable result. I have my doubts about these polls. But it might not matter much who faces Macron: unloved yet unbeatable.
Macron isn’t even campaigning. He’s at 30 per cent in polls for the first round, campaigning through a torrential downpour of electoral bribes. That after this binge there will be a bill is unmentioned by the media, which has been feasting on subsidies itself, much of it in the form of government advertising. France Inter, the state broadcaster, is known here as Radio Macron.
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