Who will be the next president of France? The election over two Sundays in April and May this year will decide the future not just of France but of Europe. The French president remains the most powerful chief of any democratic state if he also commands a majority in the National Assembly. While Ms Merkel has to look over her shoulder at the German constitutional court in Karlsruhe and David Cameron has to worry about Nick Clegg and unhappy backbenchers, Nicolas Sarkozy is master of all he surveys.

On the face of it he should have little problem. While the socialist candidate, Francois Hollande, leads in the polls (35 per cent to 28 per cent) these figures are all but meaningless. After triumph of the primary elections when nearly three million people took part in a selection process that chose Hollande as candidate, his campaign has failed to gain velocity or visibility. It was made worse by the anti-German attack on Ms Merkel that she was a new Otto Von Bismarck, the German chancellor who crushed France in 1870 and who annexed Alsace-Lorraine. Arnaud Montebourg, a senior French socialist MP – think Tony Benn in the 1980s – made the attack which brought scorn from the right as well as many left and liberal commentators. In 2005, Montebourg led the No campaign against Hollande in the referendum on the EU constitution.

Hollande has also failed to get a firm grip of the party. An alliance with the Greens has caused fury as flaky, superstitious Green candidates have been given safe socialist seats. The Greens want to quit nuclear and have no George Monbiots to argue the foolishness of giving up the only guaranteed non-CO2 source of electricity. The socialists meanwhile say they are in favour of nuclear power. Rather like Francois Mitterrand’s alliance with communists in the 1970s, Hollande is hoping to offer a broad front politics without ever expecting to deliver its formal programme.

And there is the Le Pen problem. Until 1980, up to a quarter of French working-class voters voted communist. The end of communism left this giant voter reserve for whoever could win it over. The French socialist party was largely BoBo – Bourgeois-Bohemian. Its MPs came from the top educated elites of the French professional classes with rarely a worker in sight. It embraced the liberal globalised order that arose after 1980. On the whole this secured a majority in Mitterand’s two presidential elections and three National Assembly elections. It came badly unstuck in 2002 when Jean Marie Le Pen beat the socialist Lionel Jospin and went into the second round with Jacques Chirac.

Since then the French left has not found language to attract back a largely anti-EU, anti-foreigner, above all anti-Muslim group of voters. A study just out notes that these voters are not so much indignant, as invisible. They do not occupy anything. They permanently on the down escalator while opposite them are people and classes moving up. Can Hollande represent les invisibles? French political scientists can produce more classifications for voters than any other country. Hollande is pitching his tent not as a non-sayer to the EU, but as a critic of the austerity, public service cutting ideology demanded by the banks and credit ratings agencies to save the euro.

He is more pro-European than Sarkozy in the sense he is willing to share France’s UN Security Council seat with the EU as a whole. Quite how this would work is not spelt out but the sense that France can play a role in Europe – in contrast to the abdication of European ambition by the London political elites – is striking.

Sarkozy faces lots of little parties and presidential hopefuls – like the flamboyant flowing locked Dominique de Villepin, a former prime minister – as well as the strongly showing Marine Le Pen. But are any of these strong enough to get more votes than than his efficient UMP party? UMP means Union for a Presidential Majority, as if all that counts was to keep Sarkozy in power with all the patronage and help for special interests that flow from controlling the Elysee.

Hollande has to offer some ideological vision and values. He has loads of politicians who were ministers or aides under Lionel Jospin between 1997 and 2002 and who have been hanging around waiting for power ever since.

France, once the powerhouse of European political thinking, is curiously flat in terms of policy or intellectual vitality. There are plenty of good ingredients in the socialist kitchen but no three star chef to fuse them into new dishes or even convincing menus of the political cusine traditionelle. Whenever I meet French people I ask who they think will win irrespective of their own preferences. With a Gallic shrug of the shoulders, most reply ‘Sarko but Hollande has every chance’.  That is a better position than the left has been in for a generation.

And if President Hollande takes over in six months, European politics will change dramatically.

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Denis MacShane is MP for Rotherham and a former minister for Europe

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Photo: Guillaume Paumier