The New Continent

Benoît Hamon is far too Green and far too pro-EU.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on the other hand, harbours no fantasy that the Road to Hell is economic growth.

But he does say that it is, "impossible to achieve the democratic change needed in the EU, all power belonging to technocrats with no popular legitimacy."

Seen from the rest of the world, at least, François Fillon would be still be better than Marine Le Pen.

But any second round with a Le Pen on the ballot would be, as it has been once in the past, a referendum on the Front National and on everything behind it.

The other candidate would be bound to win. Again, that has happened in the past.

Why, then, should that candidate not be Jean-Luc Mélenchon?

Magic realism emerged in Latin America because its inhabitants' ancestors had largely found themselves confronted with flora and fauna, landscapes and weather, places and people, of the like of which they had never so much as heard tell.

The rest of those inhabitants' ancestors had been the people who had found themselves confronted with the first lot and with their ways, including their reactions to everything on the New Continent.

Before too long at all, absolutely anything had seemed par for the course.

How very unlike the mind of the Old Continent. In those days. But not in these days.

President Mélenchon?

Far, far, far stranger things are now happening all around us, all the time.