I’ll second Noah Millman’s latest comments on the French presidential election:

The vote for the Euroskeptic right is just a whisker above what it was 10 years ago. The vote for the Euroskeptic left is substantially smaller than it was 10 years ago.

The big difference between now and ten years ago is that the Socialists improved significant over their humiliating collapse in the first round of voting in 2002. It is surprising that the mass panic that followed the first round of voting in 2002 has already been forgotten. Despite Marine Le Pen’s efforts to render the National Front (FN) less offensive to mainstream French and European opinion, her candidacy was somewhat less successful than that of her father, who benefited from the simultaneous Socialist collapse and surge of protest votes for the FN from both left and right. The French left in general was in much poorer shape ten years ago at the end of the unhappy Chirac-Jospin cohabitation, and since then it has profited from the unpopularity of Sarkozy and the UMP‘s domination of the government for the last decade. Considering how unpopular Sarkozy was and how much Marine Le Pen has tried to reinvent the party, the FN’s result was a bit underwhelming, and it suggests that there is still a ceiling for the party’s support that it has not yet found a way to raise.