Transatlantic transpositions are inherently tricky, but one way to understand France’s upcoming presidential election runoff (on April 24) between center-right incumbent Emmanuel Macron and right-wing racist Marine Le Pen is to imagine if the two choices presented to American voters were George H.W. Bush and Pat Buchanan—and moving their actual 1992 Republican primary rivalry to a hypothetical general election in 2022. How liberals and leftists would respond to such a choice is anybody’s guess.

Just as it’s anybody’s guess how French leftists will respond to the choice of Macron and Le Pen in just under two weeks. What the first round of French presidential voting last Sunday made clear is that France is roughly evenly divided between left, right, and center, with the combined votes of each bloc coming in at about a third of the electorate. Had the Socialist, Communist, and Green Party votes been consolidated with that of leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he would have bested Le Pen and now be running off against Macron. Instead, the French left faces a rather dismal choice.

What it should do is swallow hard and vote for Macron, on the principle that a centrist elitist poses less of a threat to the nation’s Muslims and its democratic civic culture than a neofascist whose party has received significant financial support from Vladimir Putin. It’s by no means clear, however, that that will happen. An Ipsos poll taken last Sunday showed that just 34 percent of those who voted for Mélenchon said they’d vote for Macron in the runoff, with 30 percent saying they’d vote for Le Pen and the rest saying they’d simply not vote or hadn’t yet decided what they’d do. (On election night, Mélenchon told his supporters that they simply couldn’t vote for Le Pen, but declined to endorse Macron.)

There’s no question that Macron deserves the left’s reservations. When he first campaigned for the presidency five years ago, he ran as someone who vowed to replace and transcend the rule of the center-left Socialists and the center-right neo-Gaullists with a fresh face that would add the best of both parties’ programs to his own innovations. Instead, he governed as a center-rightist continually looking over his shoulder at the rising nationalist right and embracing some of their anti-Muslim agenda. Casting aside any of the vaguely left appeals he’d made in his campaign, he governed as a right-wing post-Gaullist conservative, eliminating the nation’s wealth tax, reducing social benefits, and sporadically going to war against the nation’s unions. Even now, he is campaigning on raising the retirement age (that is, eligibility for senior pensions) from 62 to 65. As the invaluable Thomas Piketty points out, working to 65 means one thing to working-class French men and women, who start work around age 18, and another to French college graduates, who don’t start work until they’re in their early twenties. (For those who think that Macron is displaying a unique level of political idiocy in sticking to his from-62-to-65 position while running off against Le Pen, remember that Barack Obama insisted on championing the Trans-Pacific Partnership even as Hillary Clinton was in the process of losing the once-industrial Midwest to Donald Trump.)

For her part, Le Pen, like the European populist right, defends the welfare state that Macron has sought to diminish. But, also like the European right, she wants it reserved for those who are historically French—that is, white folks.

But if Macron deserves the left’s reservations, France does not. When the greater evil is neofascism, the case for the lesser evil doesn’t have to affirm any of the merits of that lesser evil, save one: It doesn’t plunge France into the level of state-enforced bigotry (and worse) that France experienced when its government ruled from Vichy and lent the Nazis a helping hand.