In Roger Cohens op-ed piece on France in the New York Times there is a post-EU-election point that, if it turns out to be even close to accurate, should shock us all. Amid the crew of extreme right-wingers, closet Hitlerites, xenophobes etc. swept into office in this last election across Europe, what if Marine le Pen should indeed have a shot at the French presidency next time around? Hard even to imagine, but maybe we better start imagining it. Tom Such bile must find political expression. It has in the rightist, anti-immigrant National Front of Marine Le Pen, victorious in European Parliament elections, her gaze now set on a greater prize: the Élysée Palace. Make no mistake, she could become president. The National Front has surged before, notably in 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen, the incumbent’s father, reached the runoff stage of the presidential election. But in the dozen years since then the European and French crises have deepened. France has near zero growth and growing unemployment. With an estimated 25 percent of the European Parliament vote, the National Front crushed both the governing Socialists (14 percent) and the center-right Union for a Popular Movement (20.8 percent). “An earthquake, was the verdict of the Socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls. He is not wrong. A two-party system is now a three-party system. Marine Le Pen, subtler and cleverer and more ambitious than her father, is electable. She is plausible... According to the French daily Le Monde, the National Front took 43 percent of workers’ votes and 37 percent of the vote of the unemployed. Popular sentiment in France has turned against a Europe associated with austerity, stagnation, unemployment and high immigration. Le Pen’s promise of a more nationalist and anti-immigrant France, rejecting European integration and America, has appeal to the disenchanted. A promised Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, with Putin and his “family values” as Europe’s salvation, masks a void of economic ideas. nytimes/2014/05/27/opinion/cohen-the-banality-of-anger.html
Posted on: Tue, 27 May 2014 15:17:14 +0000