"The French left may yet lose to the most unpopular president in the history of the fifth republic"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/24/new-europe-france-french-left

By any normal reckoning, the French left should be on the verge of an electoral breakthrough. Nicolas Sarkozy is the most unpopular president in the 50-odd-year history of France's fifth republic. Damned as the bling-bling "president of the rich" who championed the market on the eve of its greatest crisis in the postwar era, barely one in five think he's doing a good job.

There is even speculation that he may not stand for a second term. And whatever bounce the embattled president might derive from his new role as a war leader in the Libyan conflict is thought unlikely to last. But although the main opposition Socialist party led the field in countrywide local elections last Sunday with 25% of the vote, while Sarkozy's centre-right Union for a Popular Movement scored a humiliating 17%, it was the far-right National Front that registered the strongest advance, coming in less than two percentage points behind the ruling party. Already the Sarkozy camp is in disarray about how to respond to the front's success, having failed to win back supporters with attacks on multiculturalism, an anti-Roma migrant campaign and a legal ban on the Islamic face veil. In some polls, the front's new leader, Marine Le Pen, was ranked second for the crucial runoff in next year's presidential elections.

But Le Pen has rebuilt the front's fortunes not only on the back of anti-immigration and Islamophobic incitement at a time of record youth unemployment, insecurity and squeezed living standards. She has also been stealing the left's clothes on public services, social protection, neoliberal globalisation and the "ultra-liberal ideology of financial capitalism", even invoking the names of historic French communist leaders such as Maurice Thorez to appeal to working-class voters alienated from what they see as a Tweedledum-Tweedledee political establishment.

The possibility that despite Sarkozy's unprecedented unpopularity, a weakly-led and divided left could still miss an open goal is taken seriously. Hamon warns: "Sarkozy can't win the presidency – but we can still lose it."

Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.

…uh…

Just a guess! My grandfather was a registered socialist.