This Sunday, the French will go to polls to elect their next leader. Though President Nicolas Sarkozy has gained ground, he’s still trailing socialist candidate Francois Hollande by five points in the final polls before election day. If Hollande wins, it will be hard to shake the impression that the French are in total denial about the inevitability of their nation’s collapse under the weight of their welfare state.

Though there are a number of reasons why Sarkozy is in danger of losing — most notably, the state of the economy — it’s pretty difficult to look at Hollande’s socialist platform and imagine that he could be elected by a country that has any grasp of reality. France’s debt has reached 86 percent of its economy and unemployment has hit 10 percent. The French want to blame Sarkozy’s austerity measures, but the only reason such measures were needed in the first place was that for decades France has made welfare state obligations that it cannot possibly meet.