If the U.S. election season looks too depressing, you might consider following the presidential primaries in France instead. A week ago, the French magazine Le Point—which lies on the French center-right but is very far from the intellectual conservatism in the British or American sense—dedicated a whole issue to the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, asking on its cover whether Thatcherism was “the best platform for the 2017 presidential election.”

Don’t hold your breath yet for sweeping Thatcher- and Reagan-style reforms coming to France next year, of course. Nonetheless, it is impossible to ignore that the tone of political conversations in Paris has been vastly different from the messages that Americans have been hearing from Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.