Donald Trump’s French connection
The leader of the National Front is not yet the frontrunner for the Elysee, but the fact that she has become an entirely plausible contender should be enough cause for concern
Donald Trump is disgraceful; Marine Le Pen is dangerous. The frontrunner for the American Republican presidential nomination has a flair for the outrageous. The Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln could well find itself eaten by its own grotesque creation. American democracy will endure. The leader of France’s National Front could upturn the politics of a continent.
Last week, Trump’s call for a bar on the entry of Muslims to the United States stole the headlines from Le Pen’s triumph in the first round of the French regional elections. Rivals in the US Republican race disowned the latest outburst from a candidate whose campaign has peddled unabashed xenophobia. Politicians across the globe joined the general condemnation. Even against his own debauched standards, Trump had gone too far.
The opinion polls will tell us soon enough whether the Republican base shares such disgust. Past outpourings of unvarnished nativism have done Trump no harm among GOP activists. Yet, it is still hard to find a serious Republican who believes he will secure the nomination. If they are wrong, Hillary Clinton seems assured of a smooth path to the White House.
While Trump shouts, Le Pen has prospered by whispering. Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, founded the National Front on a platform of unapologetic antisemitism. He describes the Holocaust as a mere “detail” of history. His daughter has expelled him from the party. She has replaced overt racism with insidious innuendo. A thin veneer of respectability, she hopes, will be her route to the Elysee Palace in the 2017 presidential election. Her targets are Muslims rather than Jews. And it is all wrapped up in pseudo patriotism.
The fear generated by the terrorist attacks in Paris probably contributed to her party’s first place in the regional elections. Le Pen has exploited the outrage in much the same way as Trump has traded off the Daesh-inspired shooting in San Bernardino, California. And the flight to Europe of refugees from the wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan has been a gift to a party that elides Islam with terror.
Tapping into deeper discontents
She has been blessed by her opponents. French President Francois Hollande’s ratings are up since the Paris attacks, but the Socialists wear the ankle chains of economic failure. Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president who leads the centre-right Republicans, is loathed by a significant slice of the electorate.
To see the success of the National Front as a cyclical phenomenon, however, is to miss the way populists of the far right and hard left across Europe have tapped into deeper discontents. After years of high unemployment, stagnant living standards and rising immigration, globalisation has become the midwife to aggressive nationalism.
Le Pen’s currencies are fear and prejudice. The enemies are “outsiders” — in this case Muslims and international capitalism. Her answer is to close the borders and reclaim national control over the economy. Politics, she says, has become a fight between “nationalists and globalists”. The message is crafted to appeal as much to disenchanted voters on the left as to nativists on the right. She is on to something. Cast an eye across the continent and extremists of every shade blame globalisation for the insecurities of the age. The mainstream parties are accused of colluding in a project in which the only winners have been the elites. Euroscepticism, once the eccentric preserve of British Conservatives, has become a convenient vessel for hostility at once to immigrants and multinational corporations.
Le Pen’s currencies are fear and prejudice. The enemies are “outsiders” — in this case Muslims and international capitalism. Her answer is to close the borders and reclaim national control over the economy.
‘Parasites and disease’
The ugly nationalism of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister, a self-confessed admirer of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, merges seamlessly into the unvarnished anti-semitism of his country’s Jobbik party. In language reminiscent of the 1930s, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the far-right leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, claims the refugees arriving in Europe from the Syrian civil war will spread “parasites and disease”. Elsewhere, the electoral gains of such populists are pulling mainstream parties to the nationalist right.
Germany has largely escaped a tide of xenophobia lapping over much of eastern and central Europe, but the influx of Syrian refugees has left Chancellor Angela Merkel vulnerable to those in her own Christian Democrat party who fear being outflanked on the right by the new Alternative fur Deutschland. Not so long ago received wisdom had it that a fracturing of the euro presented the greatest threat to a liberal, outward-looking Europe. The big danger now is from the rise of identity politics.
Le Pen is not yet the frontrunner for the Elysee. But the fact she has become an entirely plausible contender should be warning enough. The National Front leader is not just another unpleasant populist. She promises a return to a past Europe thought it had left behind forever. In 1940, George Orwell reviewed Adolf Hitler’s Prescient as ever, the great English writer alighted on the Nazi leader’s emotional connection to the German people. Hitler understood that, sometimes, people looked beyond materialism for “struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty parades”.
Modern-day national socialists such as Le Pen are tugging at the same visceral emotions — the need to “restore” the nation against the enemies within and without. This really is dangerous.
On the web