Reality slaps the left out of office in France

Le Pen rises again. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine:

"the most salient fact about the French elections is the degree to which they show a France that is moving steadily to the right. 'Sixty-five per cent to the right, in fact,' as I am told by Louis Dreyfus of the Nouvel Observateur. Only 30 percent of even the dwindling blue-collar electorate can now be counted upon to vote Socialist or Communist. The surprise 'centrist' figure in the contest, Francois Bayrou, is an upper-crust Catholic from the elite ranks of Giscard d'Estaing's rump conservative faction. The front-runner, Nicolas Sarkozy, is a 'law-and-order' hard-liner who promises to get tough with young Muslim slum-dwellers and rioters. The superficially glamorous Socialist, Segolene Royal, who got the nomination only by forcefully repudiating her party's Old Left, has pitched herself as the spokeswoman for the holy trinity of the tricolor, the Marseillaise, and Joan of Arc. M. Le Pen smirks broadly and says that everyone is moving his way in one form or another. And he isn't completely bluffing. There is a reason why the French Communist Party, which used to dominate the working class, the unions, and much of the lumpen intelligentsia, is now a spent force that represents perhaps 3 percent of the electorate."