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

“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 have a new president and Emmanuel Macron , who is constitutionally barred from serving more than two consecutive terms, will have left after a decade in the Élysée Palace. The number of candidates jostling for position in the race to succeed him – whether formally declared, plainly preparing to do so, known to harbour presidential aspirations or merely on record as “interested” – currently stands at (wait for it) 35 . The obvious danger, as Paul Taylor observes , is that with so many runners and riders from the moderate left, centre and centre-right, the presidential race ends up being a shoo-in for the far right, currently comfortably ahead in all first-round polls. For the EU, the blow would be immense. A nationalist leader in Paris could paralyse the bloc’s decision-making, challenge the supremacy of EU law and push a “France First” agenda that undermines the single market and Schengen free-travel zone. Yet unless the mainstream parties get their act together, the prospects for the EU’s second-largest economy and only nuclear power being run by a far-right president from this time next year look alarmingly high. …