Socialist candidate Benoît Hamon’s campaign is now at an impasse, because he couldn’t see that the neoliberal fox would refuse to accommodate the socialist hen. That is the opposite strategy to the one employed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has taken leadership of the Left.

The elections of the past were long and rather boring. Carried forth by a liberal wind, there was a seamless exchange of office between the self-assured right and the lightweight left — these wholehearted converts to market modernization — in the eternal present of capitalism. Capitalism had been made master of a globalized space and a financialized time. Endemic unemployment, consumerist exultation, and terrorist or criminal horror made up the three dramatic extremes of a little game buzzing along, spiced up only by the candidates’ antics or the scenes made by betrayed friends.

2017 is not of that vintage. Beneath the slow trickle of twists and turns of electoral competition, a political map is taking shape, with clear dividing lines. In France, history is back. Here as elsewhere, the social tectonics of the great economic crisis of 2008 are doing their work. The routine presidential stables are recomposing at great speed. They are realigning political forces around the three options nestled within the infra-world of our political modernity. These are three irreducible colossus, destined to confrontation.