L’EFFET TRUMP? The French election is now Marine Le Pen vs a collapsing French establishment.

This is because France fluctuates between short spasms of change and longer periods of immobility. It has developed institutional barriers and tacit compromises to hold things steady. Its current Fifth Republic is a ‘republican monarchy’, with parliament downgraded and a powerful president supposed to unite the nation — a task sadly beyond most politicians. Another, less noticed, institution goes back even further than Enjolras’s fictional death on the barricades: the two-round ballot, designed in the 1820s to prevent hotheads like him from winning elections. It gives voters and politicians a second chance, not so much to reconsider their own choices as to react against the choices of others. In the first round you vote for the person you want; in the second you vote against the person you fear.

This evolved historically into what was called ‘republican discipline’: in the first round there could be a range of competing candidates of all shades, but in the second round all loyal republicans, from the mildest liberal to the reddest communist, would vote for the candidate best placed to beat the enemy of the republic — usually a royalist or authoritarian nationalist. The apparition of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in the 1970s, combining traditionalist conservatives, embittered nationalists and nostalgic fascists, met the same response.

Le Pen could just become the first upstart to breach the institutional barricades around the French presidency. However, former Prime Minister (under Nicolas Sarkozy) François Fillon, running as an almost-Thatcherite reformer, is generally seen as the frontrunner.

But these days, who knows?