Final polls on the eve of the presidential election at France showed Francois Hollande edging past the more conservative incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the first round of the vote. M. Hollande was pegged at 29% and M. Sarkozy at 26%, followed by the charismatic neo-communist Jean-Luc Melanchon and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter, Martine, who each are at approximately 15%, with Francois Bayrou, the Pillsbury dough-boy of French politics, at 13%, with other far left candidates bringing up the rear at 4%. Then, as the Reuters newswire put it, the polls foresee M. Hollande “comfortably winning the May 6 runoff to become France’s first Socialist president since Francois Mitterrand left office in 1995.” It’s a dismal prospect.

All the more reason to note a cable just in from our erstwhile Paris correspondent, Michel Gurfinkiel, who is not so certain that M. Sarkozy is doomed. “In Right-Left terms,” he writes, the outlook is “that all non-Left parties combined garner about 53%, and all Left parties combined 47%.” So, he says, “the question is how many Le Pen and Bayrou voters will rally Sarkozy on the second ballot. My guess is that 2/3 of them at least will. Which, on the face of it, would bring Sarkozy to 46 % only or so.” On top of that, though, “there is another dimension to the picture: so far, some 30 % of the voters say they will not vote, or they are still undecided. I am sure that at least half of them will vote on the second ballot. And most of them are conservative voters who got utterly disappointed by Sarkozy during his first term, but still hate the Left even more.”

“If I am correct on this account,” Mr. Gurfinkiel concludes, “Sarkozy may win by a small margin.” We report that possibility not because we’re invested in M. Sarkozy’s success, though he is better than either Presidents Chirac or Mitterrand. Rather to mark the possibility that France may not take such a dramatic turn but rather is only teetering at the brink of a long decline. All the more reason to wonder whether an American president who had a better grasp of the European drama, a clearer commitment to the idea of American exceptionalism, a more emotional connection to the possibilities of France than President Obama has on any of those points, whether such a president could have played a more constructive role in leading the French away from the disaster that socialism would, if it comes, be for them. We comprehend that it’s a long shot, but one way to think of a France bereft of inspiring leaders is as an opportunity for a strong and articulate American president to inspire the French in our direction.