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 protectionist, 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 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 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? contracts given to friends of Liberals).

It would seem that now, desperate to cling to power, this group will try to once again pull the wool over the eyes of Ontario voters by cooking the books and by buying voters with their own money (Hydro rebates to be paid by future generations). Wake up Ontario. Don’t buy what these snake oil salesmen are selling. It is truly time to “throw these bums out”.