Thirty-five people want to be the next president of France. What could possibly go wrong?

Unless the mainstream gets its act together, next year’s election looks likely to hand the keys of the Élysée to the far right • Don’t get This Is Europe delivered to your inbox? Sign up here “The real risk,” France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, reportedly said last month, “is that this tangle of ambitions reflects such a lack of engagement with reality on the part of all these candidates that voters find the whole thing grotesque.” He has a point. By this time next year, France will h...

By Jon Henley, Europe correspondent