One reassuring thing about France is its consistency down the years: trains still run mostly on time, coffee in the land of cafes remains undrinkable, and, whatever the season, the intellectual class continues to supply elegant variations on the same theme: France is always about to collapse.
The present mood feels familiar – and fatalism, of course, is a habit in France. At a recent dinner among friends in Paris I was treated to a typically balanced menu: great food and mood, paired with apocalyptic forecasts. After nine years of Emmanuel Macron’s right-leaning rule France stands at the abyss, one guy said, as he cut the head off an asparagus. The country hovers somewhere between civil war and financial bankruptcy, another added, cooling her forehead with a glass of cold white wine.
Under the grey Paris sky, blurring into the city’s zinc rooftops, there was little agreement about much. Yet one year before the 2027 presidential election, French people seem to have arrived at the same conclusion: the far-right National Rally (RN) will conquer the Élysée Palace for the first time.
“France has a talent for depression,” author Michel Houellebecq once said, before adding, with characteristic ambiguity, “I resemble France.” It was perhaps also an acknowledgment of how spectacularly wrong Houellebecq has often been about French politics. He gave Macron no chance of beating Marine Le Pen in 2017. In his novel Submission, he had the nerve to imagine a fundamentalist Islamist party winning the 2022 presidential election – this in a country where Islamophobia is normalised and the cocktail hour holy.
So, the question returns. Is the anxiety over next year’s presidential vote another passing moment in the history of a country prone to hysteria and pessimism?
To be sure, the far right has never been closer to power. According to recent polls the RN candidate – whether Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella – would win every plausible runoff, except against Macron’s former prime minister Édouard Philippe.
But with Philippe now facing investigation over accusations of corruption, and what feels like half the French political class testing the waters for a presidential run, it is far from certain that he will emerge as the centre-right candidate, let alone make it to the second round. France’s electorate has drifted so far to the right over the past decade that a divided left faces an uphill battle.
Thus, as in the past two presidential elections, the decisive question could be whether leftwing voters can swallow their pride and vote for the centre-right candidate in the runoff. As mayor of the historically working-class port city of Le Havre, Philippe retains some credibility among leftwing voters. But even before prosecutors announced their investigation on Tuesday, many were simply tired of always having to choose the lesser evil and keep the centre-right in power.
Parts of the non-far-right electorate also seem almost to want the RN catastrophe to happen. Out of nihilism. Out of a craving for spectacle.
More often, though, it is simply resignation. French people at times resemble someone who keeps hearing on the news that there’s a burglar roaming the neighbourhood. Exhausted by fear, they eventually set the jewellery box on the doorstep. Perhaps, by next year, France will opt to let RN take power, rather than have to deal with the anxiety any longer.
Yet two lessons from history are worth remembering.
First, French presidential elections rarely turn out as pundits and political elites predict a year in advance. Examples are legion. No one had François Hollande on their bingo cards for victory in 2012, yet he emerged after Dominique Strauss-Kahn had to withdraw from the race after his arrest on rape charges (which were later dropped). In 2017, few anticipated that Macron, then a young former banker turned politician with little name recognition, would emerge victorious.
So no, the die is not yet cast. The presidential race remains wide open.
The second lesson is more curious. France is, to my knowledge, the only country with what I would call a reverse “shy far-right voter” phenomenon.
Polls routinely overestimate RN support in presidential runoffs. In 2022, the average of all polls conducted within a year of the first round put Marine Le Pen at 44.2%; she received 41.45%. In 2017, a similar average of polls put her at 37.78%; she finished at 33.9%.
Generally speaking, voters are reluctant to admit support for the far right. In France, things are different. At the bar or in the locker room, people may say that they will abstain or vote RN to stick it to Paris. But in the voting booth, many still choose whoever embodies the status quo – in much the same way as they continue to drink the bad coffee everyone loves to despise. In blasé France, apathy is also a form of performance.
And while surveys show deep anxiety about the future, most French people are remarkably content with their present lives. In 2026, 75% of respondents in the Ipsos Happiness Index said they were happy. That was even 4% up from 2024. And with about 60% of French people owning their homes, France’s citizens remain broadly asset-holding and cautious.
Yes, France retains an appetite for extravagant political adventures. The revolutionary liturgy remains very much alive, as each cycle of protests reminds us. Yet in the history of the Fifth Republic, France has elected a president with a genuinely radical manifesto only once: the socialist François Mitterrand in 1981.
Today, the only radical force with a credible path to power is RN – which is looking for a revolution of a very different, troubling kind. But as the 2027 presidential campaign gathers pace after the summer, it will be worth recalling the warning of the poet Paul Claudel to his compatriots: “The worst is not always certain.”
If France has a fatalist and depressive streak, it is precisely because it also possesses a deep voluntarist and idealist tradition: one that gave birth to the nation of liberté, égalité, fraternité. That tension is what keeps the country politically alive, and far from apathetic. And that is why there are reasons for optimism.
