The French election

Here's how the French presidential election is going to work. This Sunday's vote will pick the leading two candidates, who will then have another two weeks to campaign for the run-off vote. But the leading four candidates are now bunched together so closely in the polls that any two of them could make it through to the second round. Including a couple of quite worrisome people.

The permutations and combinations are mind-bendingly complex. One reporter interpreted the pollsters' latest attempt to predict the second-round outcome as follows: "Macron would win the run-off against any opponent, while Le Pen would lose. Melenchon would defeat everyone except Macron and Fillon would lose to all except Le Pen."

The point, however, is that nobody knows which two will actually be in the second round. The four main candidates are all predicted to win between 19 and 22 percent of the votes on April 23, a spread that is no greater than the polls' margin of error. And as of last weekend, one-third of the voters were still undecided.

So there are six possible outcomes to this Sunday's vote - and one of them, just as plausible as the others, would see the fascist and the crypt-communist fighting it out for the presidency in the second round.

Two of the candidates, Emmanuel Macron and Francois Fillon, are worthy centrist figures in the traditional mound of French presidents. Macron, a former investment banker, has a younger, more modern vibe, something like a French Justin Trudeau, but neither man poses any serious threat to the status quo. Whereas the other two....

Marine Le Pen inherited the National Front from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded it in 1972 as an anti-immigrant, ultra-nationalist, neo-fascist movement. He gloried...