In France, the Fringe Emerges as a Force
Together, the extreme wings of French politics are poised to capture as much as 30 percent of the vote on Sunday, according to opinion polls taken in the weeks before Sunday’s election. (French law bars publication of more current polling data in the final 48 hours before voting.) That is more than either of the two front-runners, President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Socialist challenger, François Hollande, are expected to take among a field of 10 candidates.
The move to the extremes contrasts starkly with elections just five years ago, when three out of four voters turned out in record numbers to vote resoundingly for the mainstream. Along with what pollsters expect to be the highest rate of abstention for a presidential election in a decade — some 25 percent — the shift has the potential to make this election an especially volatile and unpredictable one. How the voters at the fringes cast their ballots in the second-round runoff next month — and whether they turn out at all — is likely to decide who will be the next president of France.
The two-part structure of France’s presidential race means that many voters may be using the first round to afford themselves a protest vote. Even so, analysts say, the number who appear willing to do so by voting for the political fringe signals an alarming degree of disaffection, even anger, among the French at a critical time when they must decide which direction to take in addressing the grinding euro crisis and their nation’s economic malaise.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/world/europe/in-france-the-fringe-emerges-as-a-force.html?pagewanted=all
Seems that French voters are proactive enough to see beyond the American "lesser of two evils" POV.
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i'll bet she likes tea. 
