Ross Clark

really a Gallic George Osborne. Anyone on the Left who is cheering on Macron hasn’t read his economic policy. In Britain he would attract mobs waving “anti-austerity” banners. Macron wants to slash public spending by 60billion euros over five years. He wants to cut 120,000 civil service jobs.

Macron’s liberal economic policies don’t end there. He wants to cut taxes by 20billion euros a year. He wants to reform France’s wealth tax so that in future it will not be payable on financial assets such as shares – it was that, not so much Macron’s enthusiasm for the EU, that sent France’s stock market soaring yesterday.

Macron also wants to lower corporation tax by a third and to introduce more flexible laws on working hours and on pay.

You can guess how such policies in Britain would be received on the Labour front bench: they would be spouting about “zero hours Britain” and moaning about a government which is only out to help the rich.

If anything it is Marine Le Pen whose policies are closer to the traditional Left. It is she who opposes free trade, who wants to protect the jobs of French workers, who speaks disparagingly about globalisation. It isn’t so long ago that Left-wing groups were spending every May Day smashing the windows of McDonald’s and Starbucks, moaning about international capitalism.

Not for the first time the farRight and the far-Left find themselves rather close. This was recognised by Jean-Luc Melenchon who pointedly refused to throw his weight behind Macron now that he is himself out of the running. He knows that when his supporters survey the choice on the ballot paper on May 7 many of them will be drawn towards Le Pen rather than Macron.

It was just the same in the US election when Hillary Clinton felt entitled to the votes of the socialist candidate Bernie Sanders when she defeated him for the Democratic nomination. Yet many of his supporters flipped straight over to Trump because as far as they were concerned Trump and Sanders were promising much the same thing: that the workers’ jobs needed protecting from nasty foreign capitalists.

The metropolitan Left sees it differently. To them Le Pen and Melenchon are chalk and cheese – like Trump and Sanders. That is because they see everything through the eyes of minority politics and regard Le Pen as evil because she wants to make life harder for migrants.

IN FRANCE as in Britain and elsewhere the Left is failing because it has lost touch with its traditional workingclass base. It has treated concerns about migration with contempt, condemning those who express such concerns as racist. In doing so it failed to appreciate that it was insulting many of its natural supporters.

This is what makes the French election so difficult to call, even though it appears that Macron will easily defeat Le Pen in the second round. We really don’t know how supporters of the defeated Left-wing candidates will react when they examine further what Macron is offering.

Are they going to vote for him to defeat the “far-Right” or are they going to take fright at his business-friendly, free-trade policies? Which way they lean is going to have a huge impact on the future of the EU. But either way the biggest loser will be the traditional Left.