François Hollande winning the presidency of France on the coming May 6 seems to a great extent to be a settled matter, not because of the strength of the Socialist Left and its allies, but rather because the divided Right has already started waging the battle for the presidency after next. Indeed, the record rate obtained by Marine Le Pen in the first round of these elections allows her to assume that she could lead the Right over the next five years, in order to wage the 2017 presidential elections and win. Those who see how Sarkozy and Hollande are racing to win the votes of the National Front (FN – Front National) in the second round, the “understanding” they both show of its voters' viewpoint, and their attempts to get close to them and to court their stances and their demands, might reach the conclusion that the FN will be the stronger party during the next phase, and that the Right's popular base will be leaning further towards it, especially as Sarkozy's departure will leave the scene vacant before Le Pen, given the absence of a leading personality in his party – the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP – Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) – that would be able to compete against her. Sarkozy has exhausted himself with his changing and “light” style. He has promised much and offered little. And he has tied himself to a great extent to Germany and to European policy, which has made his Socialist and Far-Right competitors agree in some of their slogans on the necessity of returning to a “French France”, each for their own reasons. The reason that will drive a significant part of Le Pen's supporters to direct their votes towards Hollande on May 6 is that they believe that giving Sarkozy a second term would diminish the National Front's ability to win the battle for the leadership of the Right and to mobilize the French behind its slogans over the next five years, considering themselves to represent the authentic party most deserving of this, since Sarkozy himself did not hesitate to show his more radical tendencies and to come closer to the FN's program when it came to winning its votes. Le Pen's supporters also believe that Hollande will be an easy target. Indeed, he in their opinion does not have the qualities required of a president – he has neither any personal charisma, nor the experience required in domestic and foreign policy. In their view, his selection to be the candidate of the Socialist Party (PS – Parti Socialiste) is due to the overall mediocrity that characterized his competitors within the PS rather than to his own qualities. Moreover, facing off to a Socialist president will be much easier for the Far-Right, especially as Hollande will be facing many obstacles, not the least of which are the issues of security, Muslim extremism, immigration, the crisis of the Euro, and the country's relationship with Europe. He will also be busy throughout his mandate overturning everything done by Sarkozy and ratified within the framework of the European Union, such that he will not in practice have the opportunity to implement his own program. The repercussions of these issues are likely to worsen in the foreseeable future, and there is an increasing proportion of the French who feel socially marginalized and see an imminent danger in the fast-increasing numbers of French citizens of Arab and Muslim, and even Eastern European, origins – just as they reject globalization and European integration, which is forcing France to contribute to saving collapsing economies at the expense of its own citizens, especially in terms of their social security rights. Clearly the French have grown weary of the traditional Left and Right, both of which have been unable to strengthen the country against crises, sufficing themselves with merely managing such crises, and neither have any credible programs for the future. Thus the French public is increasingly leaning towards extremism. And this means that even if Marine Le Pen personally fails to reach the Elysée Palace in 2017, her ideas certainly will, and evidence of this will appear clearly in the legislative elections on the coming June 10 and 17.
