British fascination with the US elections is obscuring the political and financial importance of the pending French contest
So Newt Gingrich, brainy Georgia populist and former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, has won the Republicans' South Carolina primary, which gives everyone a chance to get outraged or alarmed at the prospect of a Gingrich presidency. But are we all making a mistake looking west for our spine-tingling kicks when we should be looking south?
After all, the US elections are not due until the first Tuesday in November, whereas the first round of the French presidential contest is as near as 22 April and the runoff between the two finalists will be on 6 May, just three days after Boris Johnson's and Ken Livingstone's battle to be London mayor.
France's elections are also nearer geographically and – in 2012 – politically more important as the eurozone crisis staggers on. Hopes are high that the latter can be resolved without a disorderly default – by Greece or another indebted state – but the French election could upset such calculations.
What's more, the slug-fest for the Republican nomination is harming the eventual candidate's prospects when the winner squares up against Barack Obama. I watched Thursday's CNN-sponsored debate at Charleston, all flag-waving and heart-on-sleeve patriotism, more brawn than brain, so it was pretty discouraging.
In their self-absorbed American way, the word China barely featured, certainly less than "European socialism" which they're all keen to avoid, blissfully ignorant that the best EU healthcare – including the NHS – delivers so much more for less than America's unfair and inefficient system. Who pays out most but still wins the Obesity Cup? Why, they do!
Only ex-governor, Mitt Romney, the most reality-based contender (the one Gingrich beat on Saturday night), tried to focus his attacks primarily on Obama. The others were focused on him – and on each other. We can understand why. As they see it, they stand between each other and the White House. But Obama is a formidable campaigner – better than he is a president, alas – and his staff are taking notes. He may not be brilliant, but Obama is a known quantity.
Look across the Channel and it's all rather different. Nicolas Sarkozy, 2012's other incumbent contender, is in deep trouble, personally and presidentially. His socialist opponent, the lacklustre apparatchik François Hollande, is struggling. He is the embodiment of the remote Parisian political elite – far worse than our own – despite the "Mr Ordinary" tag which Angelique Chrisafis observes on the stage-managed campaign trail. Hollande has been on a crash diet, losing weight.
Among the serious players that leaves François Bayrou, the always-to-be-watched centrist, and the National Front's (NF) Marine Le Pen. She didn't have to fight too hard for her party's nomination. As the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the ex-paratrooper who used to lead the party, she is an hereditary leader – strangely common in democratic politics – who has modernised the NF's image.
No more overt racism, second world war nostalgia or thugs running security; nowadays young NF activists run around in jeans and T-shirts. Le Pen herself is 43 and smart, the youngest of Dad's three daughters, who claims her economic analysis has been vindicated by the eurozone crisis and France's stubbornly high unemployment, now at a 12-year high.
Patriotism, protectionism and state paternalism is her message, one which has echoes of old leftwing policies. When the once-mighty French Communist party collapsed, a lot of its voters, raised on the rhetoric of victimhood and class struggle, went straight across the spectrum to the NF. Labour MPs say it happens here too sometimes, from CP to BNP.
Protectionism and patriotism/nationalism is part of the pitch we heard from rightwing candidates at the Republican primary debates last week in South Carolina. Ron Paul, the 76-year-old doctor-turned-libertarian congressman, has a huge following among the under-25s who like his simple solutions: no foreign wars, smaller government ("just get out of the way"), a return to the gold standard and little or no income tax.
Like Le Pen's simplicities, it's a recipe for ruin in the modern world, which requires sophisticated government interventions and lots of credit. But it sounds quick and simple to people who are either at their wit's end or are 19 and haven't seen much.
It's not that the left doesn't have panaceas too. The Observer highlighted the Swedish Pirates party – youthful champions of free-access-to-the-internet on everything – some of whose nostrums make the flower power generation of 1968 look as hard-nosed as accountants. "We are the next Greens," one of them predicted on arrival in the Swedish parliament.
No irony there then. But let's not overlook the Occupy movement, which is also trying to make radical sense of what even Tories and the FT are now calling the crisis in capitalism. My rule of thumb is that the function of such movements and micro-parties is to make their views known forcefully in ways that compel mainstream parties to absorb them – if they deserve to be absorbed.
Thus Wikipedia and other respectable folk joined forces with the Pirates last week to hammer the anti-piracy bill, which was in danger of passing both houses of the US Congress. There is a problem with illegal downloading and free access to other people's work but Congress might so easily have given governments too sweeping powers of intervention. It won't happen now.
It's an imperfect transmission process, but that's how it usually works when it does work. Mainstream parties have to address the hopes and fears of those who feel marginalised and do so in ways that are compatible with reality.
But sometimes things go wrong. In 2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen elbowed the French left's dull but decent Lionel Jospin out of the runoff, forcing millions of complacent leftists who had not deigned to vote for Jospin (plenty of splinter groups for their purist votes) to back Jacques Chirac – "the crook, not the Nazi", as the old Louisiana joke goes. Chirac is now serving a suspended sentence for financial fiddling while he was Paris's mayor.
It was one reason why Chirac lost the French EU constitutional referendum in 2005 – they weren't saving him twice – which had such profound effects on us all. And why the 22 April vote is more important to us all than the US primaries. After all, democracy is under great pressure in Greece and Italy – where the technocrats are seen as their last hope – while debt-laden Hungary's new constitution is causing deep disquiet among its EU friends and neighbours.
Marine Le Pen is polling 21.5% – or thereabouts – in successive polls, just behind Sarkozy. Hollande is well ahead, but plenty of French analysts think he can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the best traditions of his party. A runoff between Hollande and Le Pen if Sarkozy screws up the delicate negotiations with Berlin over the euro? Imagine how the financial markets would respond to such a nightmare.
I'm sure we won't be watching President Le Pen presenting herself to the French people as the new Joan of Arc this spring. But I wouldn't be too sure of anything in 2012.