It’s a choice between the plague and cholera. Millions of French voters are agonising at the prospect of having to choose between a candidate of Marine Le Pen’s hard-right anti-immigration National Rally (Rassemblement National – RN) party and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-left France Unbowed (La France Insoumise – LFI) movement in parliamentary election runoffs on 7 July.

Barring a dramatic comeback by President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist bloc in the 30 June first round, the second ballot in roughly half of the 577 constituencies will pit a representative of Le Pen’s illiberal national populists against a candidate of the New Popular Front (Nouveau Front Populaire – NFP), a hastily cobbled-together alliance of leftwing parties dominated by Mélenchon’s radical leftists.

“I’ve never seen such a scary choice,” said a neighbour in my small town in Provence, where the RN won the constituency for the first time in 2022, ousting the conservative Gaullist incumbent.

The way the French legislative election system works, many centrist and centre-right candidates are likely to be eliminated in Sunday’s first round because their parties are divided and they are tainted by association with a deeply unpopular president. Candidates need to poll at least 12.5% of registered voters to get into the runoff. With a predicted turnout of around 65%, that means the threshold will be almost 19%.

Macron has only himself to blame for plunging the country into an unnecessary snap election that his own Renaissance party and its allies look set to lose. The deeply unpopular president took the gamble against the advice of his prime minister, finance minister and main political allies, after the RN topped the poll in this month’s European parliament election with 31.37%.

His surprise dissolution of the National Assembly, allowing the bare minimum three-week campaign, caused consternation among many middle-class voters who fear economic turbulence,........

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