21 November 2016 (Jerusalem) – I spend part of my year in Paris, splitting my work-a-day world between my offices there and in Brussels. I follow French politics fairly closely. I had the horrendous experience of being in Paris for both the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015 and the ISIS massacres in November 2015.
Following this past weekend’s centre-right primary, it seems likely that Marine Le Pen will face a run-off in May against either François Fillon or Alain Juppé. Both are Hillary Clinton-style establishment figures, who would be ideal opponents for the leader of the far-right.
Last year Gideon Rachman, a columnist for the Financial Times, wrote “I have a nightmare vision for 2017: President Trump, President Le Pen, President Putin.” So, after Donald Trump’s victory, the next question is whether Marine Le Pen can indeed capture the French presidency? Granted, even post-Brexit and post-Trump, there is nothing inevitable about a Le Pen victory in France. But the consequences of a victory for the far-right in France would be drastic for both European and world politics. A Le Pen presidency could well lead to the collapse of the EU. She wants to pull France out of the European single currency and to hold a referendum on France’s EU membership.
Over the weekend Gideon reprised some points in his earlier post. It is behind a paywall so a brief catalog:
1. Even if Le Pen softened her stance in office, it is hard to see how Angela Merkel’s Germany could work with a nationalist and authoritarian France. With Germany and France set on radically different paths, Franco-German antagonism would return to the heart of European politics.
2. The global implications of a Le Pen victory would also be severe. Four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council would be occupied either by undemocratic governments (Russia and China), or by democracies led by nationalist right-wing leaders (US and France). Under such circumstances, the international legal order could crumble, as might once again became right.
3. And although Le Pen has moved to embrace the Trump White House and has been keenly supported by Trump’s “alt-right” advisers, there are important differences between the Trump and Le Pen phenomenons. Unlike Trump, the National Front has been around for decades and is more of a known quantity to voters. France’s bitter memories of the Vichy regime of the 1940s may also mean that the country is better inoculated against far-right politics than the US.
Disturbingly, Gideon makes a point I have heard from many in my French circle. I hear a theme: French voters, who might have feared that a Le Pen presidency would turn their country into an international pariah, may now feel that Trump’s victory has given them “permission” to vote for the far-right. The objective conditions for a turn towards authoritarian nationalism are clearly stronger in France than in the US. France has been subjected to savage terrorist attacks by Islamist extremists. There are large, poorly integrated Muslim populations in most big cities. Unemployment among the general population is over 10 per cent.
But above all, the political establishment is despised. The approval ratings of President Hollande recently hit an astonishing low of 4 per cent. The political, social, economic and international environments could not be more favorable for Le Pen.
One of my UK chat mates opined … tongue in cheek? … that a Le Pen victory might even solve the Brexit problem since there might no longer be an EU left for the UK to leave.
But as Gideon reiterates:
“More sober heads in London, however, must surely realise that the rise of the French far-right cannot ultimately be good news for Britain. A National Front victory in France would mean that the forces of authoritarian nationalism would be flourishing across Europe, from Moscow to Warsaw to Budapest and Paris. Under Mr Trump, the US could no longer be relied upon as a stabilising force to push back against political extremism in Europe.”
Merkel, who has just announced that she will be running for a fourth term as German chancellor next year, as the anchor of European stability, has the most daunting of tasks: she confronts a hostile Russia to the East and a Middle East in flames to the south. Trump has been openly contemptuous towards Merkel.
Within the EU … a God awful mess. Germany’s relations with southern Europe have been poisoned by the euro crisis, while its relations with eastern Europe have been soured by the refugee crisis. Meanwhile, Britain has voted to leave the bloc. The election of Le Pen in France could be the final blow to the vision of Europe represented by Merkel. The construction by generations of European leaders since the 1950s … vanished!
And then there are the “loans”. Le Pen asked Russian for a further €27 million loan … on the back of the 2014 €11 million loan from the Moscow-based First Czech Russian Bank, a “reward” as it were for backing Vladimir Putin’s stance on Crimea (there were leaked text messages from a smartphone belonging to the head of the Kremlin internal affairs department, documents uncovered in a raid on the HQ of the National Front, etc.; sordid stuff).
But given how American and British intelligence agencies have uncovered how the Kremlin is infiltrating political parties in Europe … not only in France, but Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, and the Netherlands …. Moscow’s determination to exploit European disunity in order to undermine NATO, block US missile defense program and revoke the punitive economic sanctions regime imposed after the annexation of Crimea are just further evidence of our “new cold war” and what a Le Pen victory means to Putin. Russian meddling has taken on a breadth, range and depth far greater than previously thought.
If Trump is possible, then everything is possible. Nothing, from now on, is unimaginable. After Trump, we know that people have lost interest in policy, instead focusing on personality. The people listen less and less to policy and they even seem less concerned about whether the candidates are telling the truth or not. They are more interested in the performance, in the theatrical quality of what is said than whether it is true. And as we know, a fascist can put on a very successful performance.