The last nine months, an earthquake has shaken France’s political landscape. First, the success of both Republican and Socialist parties’ primaries for the presidency resulted in a dead end. The right- and left-wing candidates aggregated votes reaching 26 percent of total votes in the first round of the presidential election. Five years ago, at the same stage, François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy gathered 56 percent.

Extreme Right and Left parties, campaigning on programs with such large similarities that their voters switched easily from one to the other, climbed to 43 percent. Far-left Jean-Luc Melenchon, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez’s friend, ended up becoming the Left figure of this campaign by tripling the Socialist Party’s votes.