In France, we face three kinds of disaster. One is that Sunday’s first-round result will produce a fresh runoff election between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, as in 2017. The others follow from that: either Macron’s reelection, or else — disaster to the nth degree — Le Pen winning.

Such a duel would itself further harden France’s political-ideological field around the opposition between authoritarian neoliberals like Macron and Les Républicains’ Valérie Pécresse and neofascists like Le Pen and Éric Zemmour. This would probably initiate an intensification of the reactionary offensive seen over the past few years. Any prospect of social change, however partial, would be put beyond view of a good part of the population — especially those little present in social struggles, even if they may watch them with some sympathy.

A Macron victory would inevitably lead to a new cycle of mass casualization, impoverishment for the working classes, and destructive counterreforms for wage earners in general. It would also mean projects destructive for the environment, since Macron, despite his fine words, leads a violently productivist policy. One example is the French state’s commitment to Total’s 1,440-kilometer oil pipeline megaproject to bring oil pumped from western Uganda to the port of Tanga in Tanzania, stirring strong opposition locally.