Four decades after Mitterrand’s victory, France’s left is in trouble

FORTY YEARS ago on May 10th, François Mitterrand made history, becoming France’s first Socialist president since before the second world war. At next year’s presidential election, the party the wily leader carried triumphantly to power in 1981 could make history again, but for rather a different reason. The Socialist Party runs the risk of failing to make it to the final run-off vote twice in a row.A year ahead of any election, polls need to be treated with caution. French history is littered with early favourites—Alain Juppé, Dominique Strauss-Kahn—who never made it to the Elysée. A year before the presidential vote in 2017, the name Emmanuel Macron had not been tested in a single poll. An average of polls this year, which assume that Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, will be the Socialists’ candidate, suggests that the party would get just 8% in the first round. This would not be enough to get her through to the run-off. Worse, were she in fact to make it through and face , the leader of the far-right National Rally (RN), polls say Ms Le Pen would win.