If you’ve been reading and watching international news following Donald Trump’s shocking victory, you can’t be blamed for believing France could be the next domino to fall to the forces of extreme-right, anti-immigrant nativism.

Certainly Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Front, is championing this idea of a global awakening. Trump had not yet delivered his victory speech when Le Pen gleefully tweeted her congratulations. “It’s not the end of the world,” she declared the next day, “but the end of a world.”

Her father — founder and former leader of the National Front, with whom she’s had a falling out — was even more direct. “Today the United States, tomorrow France!” tweeted 88-year-old Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The post-Trump drums of a coming Le Pen victory have been deafening over the past week. The Economist’s Nov 19 cover featured Trump, decked out in American Revolutionary garb, beating his nationalist drum in time with an admiring Nigel Farage while Vladimir Putin plays the fife. Marine Le Pen, as a Eugene Delacroix-style Liberty was right there with them, leading the people, her raised fist clutching a French tricolour.

And yet the dynamics in the coming contest between Le Pen and whoever she eventually faces off against are not the same as those that carried Trump to victory. In a recently published interview with Trump’s right-hand man, Steve Bannon, the Hollywood Reporter’s Michael Wolff noted that the US “liberal firewall against Trump was, most of all, the belief that the Republican contender was too disorganised, outlandish, outré and lacking in nuance to run a proper political campaign.”

Trump had not yet delivered his victory speech when Le Pen gleefully tweeted her congratulations. “It’s not the end of the world …but the end of a world.”

The French, however, have no such delusions. They have been awake and alive to the extreme-right threat for over two decades, and have time and again proved to be sophisticated, politically astute voters in their bid to block the menace. French conservatives and leftists have historically come together in a front républicain to block the National Front. This happened in 2002, when conservative Jacques Chirac squared off against Jean-Marie Le Pen following Socialist Lionel Jospin’s shocking defeat in the first round.

Chirac swept the second round with a whopping 82pc of the vote; such was the scale of revulsion at the prospect of a racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic bigot in the Élysée palace.

Last year — barely a month after the deadly Paris attacks — French voters did it again in the December regional elections, when conservatives and the left banded together to block a National Front sweep.

For this manoeuvre to work in 2017, however, Sarko had to go.

While there would be those on the left who, in the event of a Sarkozy candidacy, would still hold their nose and vote for anything not named Le Pen, many were worried that, should he win the Republican primary, France would see a Hillary Clinton effect, with hatred running so strong that even those who loathe the idea of a National Front government would be unable to pull the trigger for the former president.

Did Trump’s victory play a role in their decision? The answer was mixed: Most said they had planned to vote across party lines before the Nov 8 US election, but the Republican’s shocking victory had strengthened their resolve.

For many of these voters, a vote for Juppé was not even particularly painful. The former prime minister has turned into a darling of the despairing left in recent months.

Attracted by his moderate conservative platform, his public denouncement of the Hollande administration’s post-Paris attacks’ bid to strip bi-national terror suspects of their French citizenship, and his vision of French society based on respect for religious freedom and ethnic diversity, they’ve rallied around a Juppé ticket.

Sarkozy blasted Juppé for selling out to the left in a series of televised debates that were so detailed and policy-saturated, it would stun Americans. In the lead-up to Sunday’s vote, Sarkozy — in his best imitation of Trump-like demagoguery — was already crying foul over the left-wing voting in the conservatives’ primary. It was for this very reason that a number of National Front supporters — once again, we probably won’t ever know the actual figures — voted for Sarkozy in the Nov 20 primary.

In the end, Sarkozy could not cry foul because the winner of Sunday’s poll, by a whopping 44pc, was the Catholic, Margaret Thatcher-worshipping Fillon, whom the former president endorsed in his concession speech. The anti-gay-marriage crowd, represented by the Sens Commun movement, rallied for the socially conservative Fillon, who voted against the 2013 law legalising gay marriage and opposes adoption for same-sex couples.

The former prime minister happens to be a staunch Putin supporter and refuses to call for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s exit. Le Pen is likewise pro-Assad and pro-Putin. If it comes to Fillon vs. Le Pen in the presidential face-off, Putin’s going to be a very happy man — especially with a new friend in the White House.

But in any case, the nimble French left, or at least parts of it, are not ready to give up. They still have the Nov 27 primary face-off, and they’re hoping more liberals, alerted by Fillon’s anti-gay rights, Catholic support, will display the astuteness they did in cutting down Sarkozy’s presidential dreams. But if the polls are to be believed, the odds are stacked against them.

The first opinion poll published since the announcement of the results of Sunday’s first round showed Fillon getting 56pc of the vote for the second round, while Juppé claimed 44pc. Few polls show how Fillon would fare against Le Pen; until recently, his candidacy was considered a long shot.

This year’s conservative primary was the first such contest to be held in France and it was Sarkozy’s idea to keep it an open race, insisting that ‘the people’ should have a say in the campaign.

For now, ‘the people’ are indeed having their say.

Now if only the French Socialists — who, like many left-inclined parties, are adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory — could pick up their act. But that’s another story.

Hollande has not officially declared his candidacy in the 2017 race. That’s how hopeless the Socialists are these days. But he has until a Dec 15 deadline.

His German counterpart, Angela Merkel, just declared her candidacy for the 2017 German election. Leaders from this old continent can seem slow and creaky by US standards. Luckily, the citizens who vote for them remain fleet-footed and determined to do what has to be done.

Foreign Policy/The Washington Post Service

Published in Dawn, Business & Finance weekly, November 28th, 2016