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though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm.
    Over the years, the rise of the far right had made things a little more interesting. It gave the debates a long-lost frisson of fascism. Still, it wasn’t until 2017, and the presidential run-off, that things really started to heat up. The foreign press looked on, bewildered, as a leftist president was reelected in a country that was more and more openly right wing: the spectacle was shameful but mathematically inevitable. Over the next few weeks a strange, oppressive mood settled over France, a kind of suffocating despair, all-encompassing, but shot through with glints of insurrection. People even chose to leave the country. Then, a month after the elections, Mohammed Ben Abbes announced the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood. There had already been one attempt to form an Islamic party, the French Muslim Party, but it soon fell apart over the embarrassing anti-Semitism of its leader – so extreme that it drove him into an alliance with the far right. The Muslim Brotherhood learned its lesson and was careful to take a moderate line. It soft-pedalled its support of the Palestinians and kept up good relations with the Jewish religious authorities. As with Muslim Brotherhood parties in the Arab world – and the French Communists before them – the real political action was carried out through a network of youth groups, cultural institutions and charities. In a country gripped by ever more widespread unemployment, the strategy broadened the Brotherhood’s reach far beyond strictly observant Muslims. Its rise was nothing short of meteoric. After less than five years, it was now polling just behind the Socialists: at 21 versus 23 per cent. As for the traditional right, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) had plateaued at 14 per cent. The National Front, with 32 per cent, remained far and away the leading party of France.
    In recent years David Pujadas had graduated from news anchor to national icon. Not only had he joined the ‘select club’ of political journalists (Cotta, Elkabbach, Duhamel, a few others) who alone, in the history of the media, had been deemed worthy to moderate a presidential debate between the general election and the run-off, but he had outshone all his predecessors when it came to courtesy, firmness and calm. He knew how to shrug off an insult, how to settle a fight when it started turning into a brawl, and how to give the whole proceeding a dignified, democratic veneer. The National Front and the Muslim Brotherhood agreed to have him as their moderator, and certainly no primary debate had ever been more eagerly awaited: the Muslim Brotherhood candidate had been rising in the polls since the beginning of his campaign. If he managed to take the lead from the Socialists, the run-off would be historic, and very hard to predict. The left, despite repeated and increasingly dire calls from their own dailies and weeklies, refused to back a Muslim. The right, whose numbers continued to grow, seemed ready, despite their leaders’ very firm proclamations, to cross over and support a ‘national unity’ candidate. So Ben Abbes was playing for high stakes – no doubt the highest stakes of his life.
     
    The debate took place on a Wednesday, which wasn’t ideal: the day before, I’d bought an assortment of microwave Indian dinners and three bottles of red wine. A high-pressure system had settled over Hungary and Poland, which prevented the low-pressure system over England from moving south; across continental Europe, the weather was unseasonably cold and dry. My doctoral students had been annoying the hell out of me with their lazy questions, mainly about why minor poets (Moréas, Corbière, etc.) were considered minor, and who said they couldn’t be considered major (like Baudelaire-Rimbaud-Mallarmé, then Breton). Their questions