My final eve-of-poll thoughts on the French presidentials - plus, as a bonus, the wonderful Christelle Chollet's brilliant parody of election promises. It's in french but there subtitles, also in French but not too hard to follow ...
French bureaucracy is rightly renowned, though feared is perhaps a better word, the world over. I've experienced worse - the loss or, more likely, theft of my wife's passport when we lived in the UAE springs to mind - but it can formidable enough to challenge the will to live.
I wanted to vote, having acquired dual nationality (UK/French) last year. And at the Gendarmerie Nationale on the rue Bonaparte in La Londe-les-Maures, just along the Med coast from my own home in Le Lavandou, I successfully negotiated the last of various hoops, some created by my own misreading of the instructions, and instantly received the crucial e-mail authorising me to use a French citizen in London to vote on my behalf at the French Consulate, where I am registered as a voter.
Honestly, I strive for objectivity when reporting on politics. I say that with the confidence that comes from being a lifelong Labour voter who worked as a journalist for The Daily Telegraph for 29 years, albeit without inhaling.
News, which is what I covered mostly for the Telegraph, is one thing. My Telegraph knew how and where distinctions should be drawn. Articles for Comment pages are expected (or at least allowed) to express opinions, though even then I try to be fair.
No one who knows me will be in too much doubt about which way that vote of mine is to be cast at the Charles de Gaulle lycee in London on Sunday.
The choice, as chaque élève will surely know, is between the flawed centrism of Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen's far right populism, diluted in a clever political strategy that has allowed Jean-Marie Le Pen's daughter to present her movement - previously known in true jackbootish style as the Front National, nowadays sanitised, again at her behest, as Rassemblement National (National Rally) - as "a party like any other" in which her appalling father no longer has any place.
If, against all rational forecasts, she prevails on Sunday, it will be because she won support from some of those who, in the first round two weeks ago, wanted the far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon, as president.
Melenchon, honourably enough, is adamant in excluding any possibility of voting for Mme Le Pen in the decider. However, he will not urge his supporters to switch to Macron, not even if only to stop her.
Estimates suggest the biggest proportion of his support - 37 per cent was the figure I saw - will not vote at all, unwilling to choose (as one of them put it) between the plague and cholera. A few, however, will turn to Le Pen, believing her Mickey Mouse economics to offer a solution to the cost-of-living crisis, whatever they think about the xenophobic nationalism that underpins her philosophy and programme. I am not at all sure, incidentally, that 50 years of marriage to a French citizen would, in her eyes, justify my successful application for dual nationality, though I do have the advantages of being white and non-Muslim.
I am a democrat and would accept a Le Pen victory as gracefully as I accept Brexit, that is to say not very gracefully at all but accepted all the same.
Let me just hope that between now and when polls open on Sunday, enough people see the absolute good sense and decency of forming a resolute barrage against the far right. Not everyone where I spend the French part of my year agrees; both Le Lavandou and La Londe voted by well over 40 per cent for either Le Pen or the much scarier Islamophobic zealot Eric Zemmour, a combined far-right vote way ahead of Macron's.
Finally, my thanks to Chloe in Ealing for being my proxy voter.
- Further reading:
* Macron vs Le Pen: haughty putdowns and Frexit fantasies in the big debate
* When art imitates life: what did Christian Clavier and Chantal Lauby do to deserve a Le Pen link?
* What France might lool like under Marine Le Pen as Mme la Presidente
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