A Primer on the French Election

Yascha Mounk wrote for Slate about the French election:

“The hero of the game? Bah, that’s me,” French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon boasts in a YouTube video about Fiscal Combat, a video game played by millions of French voters over the last two weeks. “You confront oligarchs. It’s a battle. You capture them. You shake them. And that makes euros fall out of their pockets.”

The clip briefly cuts away from Mélenchon to show his campaign manager hunched over a laptop, pulverizing yet another oligarch to the accompaniment of a chiptune soundtrack. “Those Euros?” Mélenchon asks when the camera returns to him. “You can put them toward the common good!”

For many years, Mélenchon has been about as marginal a political figure as his endorsement of Fiscal Combat might suggest. After breaking with the center-left Parti Socialiste of President François Hollande, he has called for a 100 percent tax on incomes over 400,000 euros (about $426,000) and endorsed dictators such as Hugo Chavez. And yet, the latest polls see Mélenchon in a dead heat with centrist Emmanuel Macron, conservative François Fillon, and far-right populist Marine Le Pen. Any two out of those four might come out on top in the first rounds of the upcoming presidential elections.