Resistance and the unity of the working class is what will progress our movement. - Seumas Milne

What has transformed the contest has been the dramatic rise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, former Socialist minister and candidate of the Front de Gauche (Left Front), who has gone from 6% to 15% in a few months to become the pivotal "third man" in the election. He has done so with an unashamedly populist campaign, targeting marginalised working class voters prey to the National Front, inspiring the young and non-voters and using the kind of street language alien to the magic circles of the French political establishment he abandoned.

A particularly telling Milne moment came in 2006, when the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly voted to condemn "the massive human rights violations committed by totalitarian communist regimes". In the article he wrote in response, Milne admitted the USSR executed 799,455 people, then moved on.
"For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality," he insisted.
Now, you can quibble with the facts. Focussing only on the USSR's executions ignores the millions it starved to death in Ukraine, or in the mass deportations from the Caucasus and Crimea, the way it used rape as a weapon, or that fact it invaded without provocation half a dozen countries. You can also question those "huge advances" considering the fact that life expectancy in the USSR peaked in 1962, then declined steadily as chronic alcoholism took hold.

But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent.