French to choose between bad and worse in presidential election

Nine months before the presidential election, the candidates could well be the unpopular incumbent, Francois Hollande, his equally unpopular predecessor, Nicholas Sarkozy, and the far-right’s Marine Le Pen, says Noah Barkin

IN Michel Houellebecq’s bleak satirical novel, Submission, the French political order is upturned in 2017, after the soul-crushing re-election of Francois Hollande, the country’s most unpopular president ever.

“A strange, oppressive mood settled over France, a kind of suffocating despair, all-encompassing, but shot through with glints of insurrection,” wrote Houellebecq in the 2015 bestseller.