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French writer and poet Michel Houellebecq’s controversial, yet mordantly funny, 2015 novel ‘Soumission’ (Submission, in English) depicts the age-old dilemma of French society. And it is a prophecy about the 2022 French presidential elections that portrays the sort of Islamophobia in present-day French society, which is a carry-over effect of colonizing northeast Africa.

In Houellebecq’s darkly comic masterpiece, which mixes fiction with reality, France finds itself amid a political crisis in 2022. The rise in popularity of the leader of the National Front (a far-right party), Marine Le Pen, is perceived. To resist Ms. Le Pen, the Socialist Party allies with the newly formed Muslim Brotherhood Party, with the additional support of the right-wing Union for a Popular Movement. Someone named Mohammed Ben-Abbes becomes the president and Islamic law is instituted in France thereafter. Women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged, antisemitism spreads, and university professors are given irresistible offers were they to convert to Islam. President Ben-Abbes campaigns to extend the European Union like a new Roman Empire by including North Africa, with now-Islamicised France at its lead.

Real-life politicians such as Marine Le Pen and François Hollande are the characters of ‘Soumission’. But not a future leader, then 37 years old, named Emmanuel Macron. Mr. Macron’s party, the La République En Marche! would be formed in 2016, and he would run for the presidential election the next year, to become the youngest French head of the state since Napoleon.

Under the Fifth Republic constitution, France has a two-round voting system. If no candidate gets 50% of the first-round vote on April 10 — which the polls suggest is likely — the top two candidates will contest in a second-round run-off on April 24. The French election is a tussle between the right-wing and left-wing parties, including the far-right and extreme left. This election campaign, however, has been the most far-right in France’s modern history.