I've been watching TV5Monde with horrified fascination.

Marine Le Pen, either a sea-goddess ('Marine', Goddess of the Sea and the most powerful mother goddess) or ultra-fascist inheritor of all the most right-wing of the right, depending on your point of view, is within an ass's roar of getting the presidency of France. This is a woman who last week said that the French bore no blame for the herding of French Jews into the Paris bicycle race stadium and onward to the death camps of Poland in World War II. She is utterly anti-EU and wants France to be über-French for übermensch, with an end to immigration from France's former colonies (unless I'm misunderstanding things, Mrrzy?)

She has come only a couple of points below Emmanuel Macron, "centrist" and darling of the soft right, a Tony Blair clone who wants to cut unemployment while simultaneously sacking 120,000 civil servants (eh? how that work? eh?) and to increase the power of employers against unions, while adding to France's relatively short working hours (which have resulted in quite high productivity, as I understand?)

Gurning in the background is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a traditional leftie who wants to return Europe to its ideals and stop it being a club where the super-rich can get super-richer; the people of France don't seem to have liked that idea - which is understandable seeing the beating Greece got from its supposed EU partners when it elected a genuinely left-wing government. "Voice of the people?" they were told, "Will of the voters? HAHAHAHAHA!"

There's a run-off election in a fortnight (two weeks in American), pitting Le Pen against Macron. Virtually every country in Europe has come out pleading with the people of France to vote for Macron (against normal precedent - European governments don't comment when a country is in the middle of an election run); Le Pen has just upped the ante by stepping back from her party, the National Front, with the idea that (especially young) voters will vote for her, rather than the poisonous party her father founded.