The French Election - some key considerations

41% of the French electorate who voted on April 23 went for the crystal-clear, hard - and then some -  right. No confusion. Leaving aside the incoherent and fragile 24% Macron vote, and strictly limiting the right wing vote to those who supported explicit, unmistakable, radical rightist policies, this is a major shift in European popular politics. Using the same criteria, the conscious, worked out French left scored only 28% of the popular vote.

The 30% abstention among French voters is roughly the same as in the 2012 Elections, but 2017 is a year of acute French political crisis, which did not stir the abstentioners. The 30% therefore look unlikely to participate in round 2 of France's Presidential race in a way that would change any crucial voting ratios for Le Pen. In fact even Le Pen expects Le Pen to lose to Macron in May. She knows that the 5th Republic's political system will prevent the 41% of the right fighting the 28% of the left - as indeed it always has - contrary to all the commentators now explaining how France's political history was based 'since 1790' on such an idea. In reality the hidden principle of the Presidential second round, established by De Gaul's Fifth Republic, was to guarantee that one of the two principle establishment parties would end up in control of the President's office - after the French let off steam in the first round. And that is now what has been destroyed, partly by the divisions on the right but most substantially by the collapse of traditional French Social Democracy and the emergence of a new left movement.

Returning to Le Pen, she would undoubtedly have preferred to take pole position in the first round of voting and thereby be able to denounce the system as deeply undemocratic, in that it would take her from being the most preferred Presidential candidate straight into a large loss in the second round. But she always knew she would lose the second round in 2017 and she has been planning for it. For Le Pen two facts are decisive now. First, the hard, well-organised right (whether congealed in its current religious or nationalist modes) decisively dominates the political future in France with her in the lead (despite Fillon's empty post-last-minute plea for anti-fascism); and second, Macron and his political project, is a fantasy that will fail and fail quickly.

IMF chief Christine Laguarde's charming efforts to persuade France and Europe that the economic good times are starting to role again (the British Financial Times gurgled with joy over the news, pointing out what could now be missed through Brexit. See 'Spring breaks through the storm', FT 22/23 April) and IMF confidence was a winner for Macron. Like the Clintons and Blair - but post 2008 - Macron will go whole heartedly with globalisation while (with a few adjustments to labour rights) defending France's social safety net. Simples. But sadly the French leadership of the IMF have opened this particular window many times before, only for the structural crisis of late capitalism in its most conflicted and brutal form to rush back into the room and spoil the political consensus. Even Macron must threaten Brussels with EU reforms. (In particular more respect from the Germans.) Macron derives his support from the swirling population of self-determined de-classed, would-be optimists that will shatter (or simply be taken over by political old-handers) at the first sign that the economic Disneyland is a mirage.

In contrast, there is now, in France a socially widespread bloc (with the majority of politicised youth, also expanding in both the north and the south of the country), who are deeply suspicious of the global rainbow, even in its EU form, and who now have an anti-establishment, substantial political centre to cohere with. This current is a thousand times more steeled than Macron's wishful thinkers and could easily incorporate religious reactionaries in a crisis. And that is what Le Pen is working towards.

And the left? It is a significant political minority now in France which is not to say that it failed to provide any answer to the historic crisis of French social democracy. In fact if Social Democrat Hamon's 6% of voters had gone to Melenchon, he would be facing Macron now, in poll position for the second round and 'President Le Pen' would be history. The SDs were not the only sectarians. If 'Anti-Capitalist Party' Presidential candidate Poutou (1.1%) and 'Workers' Struggle' candidate Arthaud (0.65%) had got their supporters to vote Melenchon they would have only been 0.2% off Le Pen's vote. In other words, there is as an alternative to Le Pen's perspective. It is solidly and widely based in French society but left-confusion and sectarianism in this first stage of what will be a long and difficult battle meant that it is now more likely to have to be fought out in society and on the streets of France against what is becoming the advancing political leadership of the country.