Dismiss Le Pen at your peril

With Marine Le Pen in the French presidential run-off and the candidates of both mainstream parties out, the Establishment is breathing a smug sigh of relief at her imminent defeat. At least the Bourbons restored in France after 1814, though they had learned nothing, had also forgotten nothing. Have the smart set already forgotten Donald Trump?

Le Pen is unlikely to win the presidency. Like … um … Trump. In the first round she got only 21.5 per cent of the vote against a range of candidates who, whatever else they believed, all hated her as an insensitive ignorant bigot.

Oh, yeah. Also “far- right,” the ultimate undefined term of abuse.

She’s against same- sex marriage and wants a rising birthrate. But she’s not interested in restricting abortion. She wants to restrict immigration for cultural and security reasons and wants France out of the euro, which is sort of right-wing. But she wants to abolish France’s regions and dramatically centralize the political system, which is either left- wing or simply Napoleonic in a Charles de Gaulle kind of way.

She’s also strongly protec- tionist, a left- wing position shared by Trump. And like him she’s against the EU and NATO. But rather like de Gaulle, Le Pen would leave NATO and boost French defence spending. Is that rightwing?

Mostly she’s anti- establishment. She seems to lack Trump’s bombastic narcissism. But she is riding the same wave of angry disgust with the elite’s smug drift into disaster.

According to The New York Times, “After French Vote, Mainstream Europe Breathes a Sigh of Relief.” But while “Far- right populism has not fully crystallized electorally in Europe … the issues that have animated the movements are not going anywhere.”

Indeed. 2017 is the first election since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958 that the final Presidential vote does not involve either main party in their various guises, currently Socialist and Republican.

The official Socialist came 5th, with a feeble 6.4 per cent of the vote, under 1/ 3 of the 19.6 per cent tally of “revolutionary Leftist” Jean-Luc Mélenchon of “La France insoumise." Mélenchon, endorsed by the French Communist Party, is genuinely “far left.” And like Le Pen he is fiercely protectionist, anti- EU and wants to leave NATO.

So nearly 3/4 of the first- round vote went to nine opponents of the traditionally dominant parties, and over 40 per cent to two candidates who agreed on economic and security policy, though not on immigration or constitutional issues. As for the phew saved- by- the- bell first- place finisher, a genially vague former socialist named Emmanuel Macron who seems to think he’s Tony Blair, he wants to transcend the leftright divide and rally progressives against conservatives.

Oh, that’s original. He also wants to create a eurozone budget to do nobody knows what, funded nobody can say how, that will apparently stimulate the economy. In short, he’s the very emblem of an elite that can line its own pockets and pat its own back while smothering opportunity with red tape and debate with snobbery.

Here’s just one issue that surely feeds festering discontent. The youth unemployment rate in France is 23.6 per cent and it’s an improvement over last year. To advocate neo-liberalism under the wise guidance of Brussels, as Macron does, ensures that it will not improve. So what happens next time?

The r eal problem in France is not that Marine Le Pen might become its next president. It’s that she might lose to someone who insists everything will be hunkydory provided technocrats tweak a few labour laws and we manage to evict these malodorous cretins trying to gatecrash our glittering EU/ UN/ ENA party. And then what?

Remember that Trump won partly because everyone who was anyone believed he couldn’t, because only persons with the style, odour and education of pig swill could possibly support him. I myself felt and still feel that he was a very wrong answer. But to a very valid question.

Ditto Le Pen and even Mélenchon. The “European project” since 1945 has not been a success. The EU cannot defend itself: its economy is a stagnant mess and its traditional culture is in such decline that euro banknotes depict fictitious places. It doesn’t just stink. It stinks smugly, in a Brussels bubble of banquets, meetings and collectivist projects with no relationship to or awareness of how ordinary Europeans live, to their concerns about immigration, security and meaning.

People like Marine Le Pen are a response to the failure of the conventional wisdom even to recognize its own failure. Remember that Hillary Clinton faced populist trouble from Bernie Sanders on the left as well as Trump on the “right."

Reacting to this eruption of the unwashed onto the stage by reaching for the smelling salts with one hand and a hose with the other is not the answer to the legitimate discontents they channel. Can we not even remember that from Trump’s win?

HAVE THE SMART SET (IN FRANCE) ALREADY FORGOTTEN TRUMP? — JOHN ROBSON ALSO ‘FAR RIGHT,’ THE ULTIMATE UNDEFINED TERM OF ABUSE.