The last time a French Presidential election was anywhere near this wild was in 2002. Jacques Chirac, the center-right President, was supposed to face Lionel Jospin, the center-left Prime Minister. (The two men had been sharing power in a “cohabitation” government.) The extreme-right candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen—Marine’s father, an eyepatch-wearing former paratrooper and gleeful racist, who famously called the Holocaust a “detail” of history—had been polling a weak fourth.

Read Here – The New Yorker