Thirty-five people want to be the next president of France. What could possibly go wrong?

Unless the mainstream gets its act together, next year’s election looks likely to hand the keys of the Élysée to the far right

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“The real risk,” France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, reportedly said last month, “is that this tangle of ambitions reflects such a lack of engagement with reality on the part of all these candidates that voters find the whole thing grotesque.”

He has a point. By this time next year, France will have a new president and Emmanuel Macron, who is constitutionally barred from serving more than two consecutive terms, will have left after a decade in the Élysée Palace.