If the weapons of democracy fail them, the people won’t stop fighting, they’ll simply reach for new, undemocratic, weapons.

France has a new socialist president. Greece, no government at all. The world’s stock markets oscillate between greed and fear. Only the world’s editorialists seem content to reassure us that, in spite of appearances, very little has – or will – change.

But, if they’re right, then we are all imperilled.

Because all those reassuring editorials are based on one, chilling, assumption: that democratic politics no longer has the power to countermand the world’s bond dealers and currency traders. That in any showdown between the power of the people and the power of global financial markets it’s the people who will lose.

Except they won’t – not in the long run. Because, if the weapons of democracy fail them, the people won’t stop fighting, they’ll simply reach for new, undemocratic, weapons.

The editorial writers of the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and even the New Zealand Herald, in their rush to shore up the crumbling intellectual edifice of neoliberalism and downplay the significance of the French and Greek elections, have failed to digest all of the news emerging from those contests.

In their eagerness to paint Monsieur Francois Hollande as some sort of professional, weak-kneed French politico who will say one thing on the hustings but do another in the power of German capital is permitted to humiliate and ‘‘discipline’’ France’s leader – to the profound dismay of his countrymen – then to whom, exactly, do you think they will turn?

Certainly not to the Socialist Party, nor to the equally discredited Gaullists.

No, they will turn in their hundreds of thousands to the party of the far Right.

The party that would tear up the treaties binding France to the European Union.

The party that would close the borders of France, not simply to immigrants, but to the exports of France’s neighbours.

The party that would bring the Eurozone, and the dream which inspired its creation, crashing down in the name of economic nationalism and ‘‘France pour les francais!’’

Those editorial writers also appear to have missed the ominous success of the Golden Dawn. These Greek fascists, with their Nazi-