France, as the French travel writer Sylvain Tesson once noted, “is a paradise inhabited by people who think they live in hell”. As the campaign for next year’s presidential election hits its stride with ever more wannabes declaring their candidacies, the country is in a particularly sullen mood.

If the vote were held now, the anti-immigration populist Marine Le Pen would have a strong chance of romping into the Élysée palace, riding a wave of voter disillusionment with the entire political class and a sense that “we’ve tried everything else”. But a lot can happen between now and 18 April 2027, the date of the first round. France is also a country of sudden shocks.

In spring 2011, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the then head of the IMF and an admired former finance minister, was hot favourite to become the Socialist party candidate who would beat the incumbent conservative Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2012 race. But Strauss-Kahn was felled by a sexual harassment scandal and the unfancied socialist politician François Hollande ended up in the Élysée. In 2016, the former conservative prime minister François Fillon was well ahead in the race to succeed Hollande, then he was exposed as having arranged taxpayer-funded phoney parliamentary jobs for his wife. He finished third and a young centrist outsider without a party machine, Emmanuel Macron, went on to triumph.

To understand the backdrop to next year’s election – with huge stakes for Europe and the western alliance as well as for France – it’s worth examining the unique features that distinguish the French funk from the crisis facing other advanced democracies. After all, politics has become more raw and polarised in many countries. Other big European economies are stagnating. Mainstream parties are shrinking and fragmenting across Europe under growing challenges from insurgent rightwing national populists as well as a new radical, often ecologist, left.........

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