LONDON: Here in London there ought to be more than neighbourly interest at stake in the French presidential election, whose first round takes place on Sunday. The reason is simple. By this time next month — the second round of voting is on 6 May — it looks as if France will have a Socialist president.

In the early part of this year Nicolas Sarkozy’s chances of re-election looked like toast. After a successful first 18 months in office following his election as Jacques Chirac’s successor in 2007, Sarkozy was knocked off course — as so many political leaders were — by the financial collapse and eurozone crisis. By the start of the year, he was well adrift of his Socialist challenger, Francois Hollande, in the polls.

Then came the Toulouse jihadist shootings. Faced with a terrorist crisis, Sarkozy was able to exploit the power of the presidency to bring order back to France. His ratings overtook those of Hollande, who also faced a challenge from Jean-Luc Melenchon on the left. Suddenly Sarkozy’s re-election took on an air almost of inevitability.

Yet that moment seems to have passed. In this week’s polls, Hollande is back in the lead. In Wednesday’s CSA poll Hollande leads Sarkozy by 29 to 24 per cent, with Melenchon dropping back to fourth, behind the far- right’s Marine Le Pen. In the straight fight between Sarkozy and Hollande that now seems likely to take place next month, the same poll now has Hollande 16 points ahead, with 58 per cent to Sarkozy’s 42 per cent.On one level this ought to come as no surprise. The financial crisis has dashed the careers of incumbent leader after leader: Gordon Brown in Britain, Jose Luis Zapatero in Spain, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, Jose Socrates in Portugal, George Papandreou in Greece and Ireland’s Brian Cowen. The list shows no sign of closing: in November Barack Obama may fall. To expect Sarkozy to buck the trend may simply be to expect too much.

A victory for Hollande would not just be another run-of-the-mill ousting of any old European incumbent. It would be the victory of a Socialist, and in one of the two most important countries in Europe. That makes it an event with big potential consequences not just for France, where the left has been out of power for 17 years, but for Europe — since Hollande has promised to renegotiate the Brussels intergovernmental treaty on the eurozone — and the beleaguered European left more generally. Above all, the election of Hollande would create a Europe-wide pole of influence around which hopes of an alternative economic vision would inevitably cluster. The political impact would be felt from Scotland to Greece.

But how big will the influence actually be if Hollande does win? It is tempting to want the Hollande victory to be transformative for France, Europe and the wider left. But be careful what you wish for.

Hollande’s very readable personal manifesto, Changer de destin, lays claim to the political inheritances of both Charles de Gaulle and Francois Mitterrand simultaneously. The invocation of De Gaulle is an obligatory deceit; all presidential wannabes have to pretend to the voters that they could assert the power of France as though the rest of Europe and the world did not exist.

But that of Mitterrand is much more relevant for Hollande. The fifth republic’s only Socialist president thus far came to power in 1981 with what now seems an astonishingly radical programme of labour benefits, social reforms and nationalisation — 36 banks were taken into public ownership in the first year. A year later, amid growing unpopularity and a financial crisis, it was all abandoned in favour of European integration and what Mitterrand once called modernisation “a l’americaine”.

Hollande’s programme in 2012 is far less radical than Mitterrand’s in 1981. Nevertheless it still promises a 75 per cent income tax band on euromillionaires and pledges to keep the retirement age at 60, with all this implies for French welfare spending. But the times in which Hollande may inherit the presidency are much more difficult and allow far less political flexibility than Mitterrand enjoyed. Amid the eurozone crisis, France is struggling to keep its budget under control. Debt stands at 90 per cent of GDP. Public spending stands at 56 per cent. The AAA bond rating has gone. The trade deficit is ballooning. Unemployment is near 10 per cent. Meanwhile the balance of power within the eurozone has moved relentlessly in Germany’s favour. Unless Hollande wants to bring the eurozone down, his options are frustratingly circumscribed.

In these punishing domestic circumstances, how much credibility would a Hollande government have in changing the priorities of the eurozone? Logically, a less deflationary eurozone would help France. But it is unlikely that Angela Merkel, her voters or the bond markets would sanction such a thing on anything like the scale Hollande would want, especially as the vultures gather in Spain. Hollande may write of setting the European agenda “la main dans la main avec l’Allemagne”, but the reality is that France is simply no longer Germany’s equal. Does Hollande want to become Europe’s leader of the opposition? That would mark a major change of destiny indeed.

And what of the European left? Hollande’s victory would probably be welcomed by most social democratic parties. But it seems unlikely that the British Labour party leader Ed Miliband, for one, would tie his wagon to Hollande’s. The British left has not been much in love with the French left since about 1791. Its real problem today is that it has never embraced the postwar German social democratic tradition either, and now it’s too late.

By arrangement with the Guardian